I hope my readers had a good weekend. (I also hope this post makes sense, since I've had a LOT of sugar today!) First are some pictures from earlier last week. This currently empty storefront suddenly has this ornate decoration on it. I don't know what it means.
Also, last Tuesday the moon looked enormous. I tried to take a picture of it. Here are two that kind of turned out.
Friday for Valentine's Day, Travalon and I had a romantic dinner from the Culver's drive-thru. This was because we were going to see Banana Wind, a Jimmy Buffett cover band, at the East Side Club. Here's a short video:
I also stood inside a giant margarita with Travalon and rode a banana. Here's photographic proof:
Yesterday I met Tiffy and we tried to go to lunch at Himal Chuli, but it was too crowded so we went to the Globe. Then I asked what she would like to do next, and to my surprise she said she would like to help me with Rich's birthday cake. (I had been awakened that morning with a terrible headache, but once it subsided, I baked the cakes.) Meanwhile, Hardingfele texted me that Olbrich had its production greenhouses open, but she did this just before they closed. Here are some cool photos she took.
I would like to note that Travalon helped me a lot while I baked the cake by getting stuff down from high shelves. Tiffy and I went to the co-op to find some extra stuff to decorate the cake, and we found pink chocolate candy bars on a ridiculous post-Valentine's Day sale, so we bought some and added them to the frosting (along with Bailey's) that went in the middle to hold the two cakes together. Since the theme of Rich's birthday party was Atomic/Radiation, we decorated the cake with the international Radiation symbol.
Then we went out to Sauk to see eagles, and we saw one fly right past us. We went to a Baroque music concert, and this is a photo of the inside of the harpsichord. Isn't it exquisite?
Rich's birthday party was supposed to be yesterday, but we had to postpone it to today because of the funeral for his old roommate's 15-year-old son. (A very tragic story - he had pneumonia and was getting better when he suddenly had a massive stroke. They don't yet know why.) Anyway, Kathbert took charge of getting the big group present, and also wrapping it.
She put a picture of Rich in front of a nuclear reactor on campus on top of the present.
Did you know Rich is an incredible piano player? Check out this video!
Ha ha, just kidding - that is a family heirloom player piano he recently acquired. We also sang him a song about how he's too young and needs some more birthdays from the songbook Cecil Markovitch gave me for my birthday. Then we had cake. Here it is with the candle we could find:
And here you can see the inside layer of frosting. I was originally going for a retinal-damaging riot of color, but putting food coloring into the pink chocolate made it looked like industrial sludge, so I just went with that.
And then Rich opened his present, and you can see why Kathbert chose the theme: we got him a brand-new microwave! He wasn't too surprised, since we have all been complaining about how his old one took ten minutes to heat up something that would take a normal one two minutes to heat, plus it had lost its handle so opening it was a unique challenge.
I told Rich to wear his "nuclear" shirt and his "nuclear" socks. Someone gave him a supplemental gift of a mug that says: "It's all fun and games until someone loses an i," because the equation on it results in an imaginary number.
Just as we were leaving, Prairie Man came with another Slow Food person, and he gave Rich another shirt (he gave him the shirt pictured above too) that says: "There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary systems, and those that don't." That's my second-favorite shirt after the one that says: "There are two kinds of people in this world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets." Anyway, Rich said he really enjoyed his birthday party.
Famous Hat
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