Surprise! or not

This year for my birthday, because there are so many wonderful restaurants in our area and because I am incapable of making any kind of important decision -- and where to go for one's birthday dinner rates as one of THE most important decisions -- I have left it up to the Hero to decide where we go to celebrate, with the stipulation that no home improvement stores be involved in the evening, as happened a few years ago.

The only thing wrong with this plan is that I am not the only one in our household for whom making decisions is statistically impossible.

"Well, where do you WANT to go?" the Hero said.

"I want YOU to pick."

"Me?"

"Like you did a few years ago, but someplace new. And no Lowe's this time," I said. "OR Home Depot."

A day or so later he brought up the subject again.

"When you say someplace new, do you mean new-new, like someplace we've never been? Or haven't-been-there-in-a-while-so-it's-kind-of-like-new?"

"Either one," I said.

He sighed.

"I want it to be a surprise," I said. "So just pick."

But this is agonizing to someone who cannot bear to not share something he knows.

Finally, later he said, "So I think I have it all figured out. We'll go to --"

"La la la!" I said, plugging my ears. "I said I don't want to know."

"For real?" This perplexed him. HE would want to know. Why would I not want to know?

He is probably still recalling the occasion of my last big birthday, when I said I did not want a big party, nor did I want to be surprised. He relayed this to some of his coworkers, all of whom were male and married.

"Dude," they said with concern, "when she says no, she means yes. She really wants a party."

"No, I think she really doesn't," he said.

"You are gonna be in big trouble, Dude. You GOTTA plan something."

Clearly torn between what he THOUGHT he knew about me, and what other men were telling him he clearly DIDN'T know about me, he confessed his dilemma to me.

"Are you secretly wanting a party? Am I going to be in trouble if I don't plan one?"

"I'm telling the truth," I assured him. "I wouldn't play games." 

But the subject is still clearly on his mind. "So," he said recently, "when you say you DON'T want to go to Lowe's on your birthday,  do you secretly mean you do...?"

The Canadians did it

There is a section of our kitchen counter that we sometimes don't glimpse for days at a time. It remains perpetually hidden by  a rotating collection of dirty dishes, dishes much too numerous for just the two of us, and that seem to grow whenever we turn our backs.

I suspect the Canadians.

There is precedent for at least some Canadians depositing unwanted goods on someone else. Ontario, for example, for years delivered its garbage to its neighbor Michigan, which, for those a little fuzzy in their geography, is not only a different state but also an entirely different country.

The reasoning was, ostensibly, that a landfill in Ontario had closed, and yet garbage was continually being produced. Ontario had an image to keep up. It was clean, tidy, pleasant. Garbage did not fit into this image. Therefore officials formed a committee to address the issue of pretending the province did not have any garbage. Talks proceeded something like this:

Committee head: Hypothetically, if we had a lot of extra trash -- which of course we don't -- how could we get rid of it? Hypothetically, of course.

Member 1: I know! Let's outsource it to Michigan!

(Heads nod.)

Member 2: Yeah, in Detroit no one will even notice an extra 11 million cubic yards of garbage. 

Committee head: Hypothetic garbage, of course.

Member 2: Of course.

And so Ontario's garbage emigrated to Michigan. And when that turned out to be satisfactory to both parties (Michigan charged a small "tipping fee"), the committee looked around for other things that might be embarrassing to the province and could possibly be foisted onto someone else. And they landed on: dirty dishes.

This is where, I posit, our kitchen counter comes in. It's really the only explanation for all the excess dirty dishes, other than that we a) are slobs or b) have ginormous appetites or c) have unwittingly been harboring aliens.

I have yet to work out why Ontario's dirty dishes landed on OUR counter.  But it is DEFINITELY better than garbage.

A hair-raising tale

Periodically we are awakened by nocturnal noises that we have assumed were coming from the walls, or maybe the attic, although the Hero expressed hopefulness that perhaps we were just hearing the neighbors. But unless our neighbors had developed an uncontrollable urge to scratch something in the middle of the night, the signs pointed more toward four-footed creatures.

The Hero grumbled about having to go up in the attic, which is scary and which he does only under duress, like when the Princess insists that yes, the Christmas tree NEEDS to go back in the attic TODAY. Because it is APRIL.

But in further proof that procrastinating sometimes does pay off, before he could make the dreaded trip through the little hole in the ceiling, I reached under the bed for the container where the heating pad lives. I stared at what had formerly been the contents of the heating pad -- wheat kernels -- strewn all over the container, along with other little pellets that had definitely NOT been part of the heating pad.

"Good news," I yelled to the Hero. "You don't have to climb up in the attic to find the mouse. It's been right here under the bed."

We made a thorough search for every nook and cranny that the mouse could possibly be using to enter and exit the room, and blocked them as much as we could with heavy books, towels, laundry baskets, duct tape, old ties and socks, etc. When we were finished, we were so well barricaded we could have held off Attila the Hun.

"Um," I said, looking around, "where do you think the bed is?"

Okay, maybe TOO well barricaded.

We wondered what the mouse would do when he found out his free lunch was off the menu -- that indeed, the cafe was closed.

He KNEW his meal was somewhere in our room, and that night, when his usual way of getting in proved to be a dead end, he simply switched to a new path and started scratching. Perhaps we had an ex-laboratory mouse, used to mazes and blocked exits.

We yelled at the mouse, but in a whisper so as not to disturb the neighbors, and stomped quietly in the areas where he seemed to be attempting to break through our barricades.

This would cause the mouse to be quiet for a while, and just when we'd fallen back to sleep, he would start up again. This went on all night. By morning -- which, fortunately, was Saturday -- we were exhausted. But also triumphant. Our position had held! We had not been invaded. True, our nerves were torn to shreds, and we staggered around like zombies the whole day, and dropped into bed at an embarrassingly early hour that night. The Hero set out traps and sonic machines and everything else Home Depot has to offer, but on successive nights there were no further noises. And nothing in the traps.

Best of all, there was no need for the Hero to climb into the attic. He's safe, at least until December.

Princess Bride Revisited

Last Christmas various members of my family mused that they rarely attended parties with other adults only -- ones that did not include kids' menus and games and decorations and Wii competitions. Once, one couple said, they HAD gone to a party where no Little Persons were included, and they wistfully described how nice it had been, for a change. So the Hero and I offered to host such a party. We all eagerly looked forward to a quiet, mature dinner gathering in the spring.

And so it was that last weekend, with babysitters procured and weather cooperating, we held the Princess Bride Revisited party, complete with shrieking eels, giants, poison, blindfolds, and even the Mafia.

The idea for this theme was sparked by the Hero's and my interest in the now-25 year old movie, which we knew our guests also enjoyed, and by our inability, despite our best intentions, to come up with any sort of actual mature theme for the gathering.

The theme also lent itself to interesting food ideas and activities, and thanks to the movie's ardent following on the web, we did not have to come up with too many original ideas.*

The Fire Swamp featured prominently in the menu, as did -- inconceivable! -- chocolate:

Fire swamp chili
Lightning sand hummus
Vengeance veggies
Pizza of Unusual Size
Miracle Max's miracle truffles, er, pills
Man in Black Dessert, consisting of brownies, chocolate ice cream chocolate chips, and hot fudge
Tums (these were unplanned, but perhaps not surprising)

Of course we also watched the movie, albeit without the sound off for a couple of run-throughs. It may very well be a record for the greatest number of times the movie has been watched consecutively with no sound, although there were subtitles. Not that most of us needed them, as we could, and often do, recite lines at random yet appropriate times. Only one Female Relative, who was not as familiar with the movie, paid careful attention to the subtitles, fearful there might be a trivia game later and that she would be found wanting.

On about the fourth time through the movie we finally turned the sound on. This was prompted by the distress of one Male Relative who insisted that the little popping fire things in the Fire Swamp had a proper name, which none of us could recall. We learned that these were called fire spurts, which regrettably were not represented in the menu.

We played several games, all of which involved hearty discussions of rules and exceptions to rules that probably took more time than the actual playing did. The evening ended with a rousing game of Mafia, which, although not strictly** part of the movie, nevertheless seemed to fit the theme of the evening -- that is to say, mature. Much good-natured offing occurred during this game, and although the rules may have been a little bent, and many reminders given to offed players that the dead may not speak, in the end we all survived.

Which is, of course, one of the themes of the movie. Right after "maturity."

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*None, in fact. Interested individuals we know personally also were eager to give us suggestions, which, again, greatly helped cut down on the amount of thinking we had to do. This allowed us to concentrate on the more important matters relating to the party, like whether or not we should blindfold our guests during the iocane powder "Battle of the Wits*** " (yes).

**Or at all.

***or "Battle of Chance," as one participant described it. Wits, chance. Whatever.

Midnight run for cupcakes

I was contemplating the fact that we would likely have to move to New York, given the recent opening of an ATM there that dispenses cupcakes 24 hours a day, when I read that DC, too, is slated to get such a machine. Whew! That was a close call. MUCH better to just drive 30 or 40 minutes in the middle of the night when the cupcake urge hits.

Or when your child informs you that he needs 31 cupcakes by morning or his classmates will never forgive him, and he will be ostracized for life, and need expensive therapy, and it will be all your fault, and he will continue to live with you the rest of his adult life because he cannot hold down a job, and he will eat cupcakes all day in an attempt to wipe away the shame of not providing them for his first grade class.

But happily, all this can be avoided as long as you live near a cupcake ATM. You can just get in your car -- or walk, if you live close by -- and pull the lever, hoping that at least 30 of the 760 cupcakes the machine is stocked with* are still inside. Of course you would be paying premium for these creations, but what is that to a parent whose only other emergency option is carrot sticks, and who faces a lifetime of therapy bills?

Probably many parents have ingredients on hand for such emergencies, but in our household cupcake-making things are not usually just lying around waiting to be fashioned into yumminess. If they were, I would make cupcakes for no reason at all, and we would eat them, and that would be bad.

Reaction to the new cupcake ATM has been positive, with people lined up to try it even during hours the cupcake store is also open. Maybe they just need to assure themselves that it would be worth coming back for at 3 am.

But not everyone is enamored of the new machine. While many individuals think it is "so cool," and that "sometimes you just, you know, need a cupcake at 3 a.m.," others are of the opinion that "It's stupid. No one needs a cupcake at 3 a.m."

Sounds to me like SOMEONE could use a cupcake or two -- no matter what time of day it is.

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*This is how many cupcakes are in the New York machine. You other cities, sorry, you have to duke it out for fewer cupcakes.