It's What I Do All Day: Birthdays, prostitutes, and a stand mixer. Spring is ON.

In case you were at all unaware, IT'S SPRING! :D It's been pretty beautiful here in the Pacific Northwest. It was rather rainy yesterday, but overall it's been spectacular. Today's agenda involves shipping some baked goods to the fam and perhaps bonding with John Waters via Cry-Baby. Because it's amazing. There might be some Sailor Moon involved as well, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Some snapshots of my life lately: (Also, I totally typed that as "snapshorts" Go me!)

Justin got me a birthday cake modeled after the Cakewrecks "Winter" cake that made me laugh until I cried. Ignore the bits of garlic peel just beyond the cutting board. I'm not a total filthy person, I swear. Those little bastards just get EVERYWHERE. So yes, I heralded in my 25th year with a cake wreck and I feel pretty good about that.

And my sister and mom, who both love me very, very much got me a KitchenAid stand mixer. So, a little story about this stand mixer (which has gotten a TON of use already. I'm pretty much mixing anything I can think of these days.)

Tammy (that would be my sister) ordered this beautiful piece of machinery off of Amazon.com. It was posted via FedEx. Now, even though I had already COMPLETELY updated my address book, attached an address to my wishlist, and did all that stuff before Christmas. Being that my birthday is March 10, I figured that three months of full updated information would have been adequate. Apparently, FedEx disagreed and shipped it to my FORMER address, where I haven't lived for well over a year.

So, of course, it wasn't delivered. And it wasn't delivered. And it was the day before my birthday and it still hadn't actually come. So, I made a couple of phone calls to FedEx and got it held at the receiving warehouse so that we could pick it up early on the 10th.

We headed out nice and early and immediately went down the wrong road, therefore going a good few miles out of the way. We tried to turn around, only to find a dead end. So we turned COMPLETELY around only to find that we couldn't get onto the correct road from the road we were on, so we had to go a little bit MORE out of our way to get onto the right street. We did that and we were heading to FedEx and everything seemed on the up and up. And then we hit train tracks. And there was a train on those tracks. A very long train. This train meant business (mostly likely freight business, given that it was a train.) It achingly slowly crossed our path and then sat there. We were looking at the caboose. A guy got on the caboose and the train achingly slowly backed up. And then sat there. We were looking at the car immediately behind the engine. At this point, we'd been looking at this stupid train for half an hour and the FedEx building was precisely .5 miles away. We could have walked to the building, picked up the package, and walked back before this stupid train was out of way. Finally, the train backed up enough to let traffic through and we made it.

Now, keep in mind that I had NO idea what was in this package. I saw on the FedEx website that was 26 pounds, and I couldn't think of what on EARTH my sister could have gotten for me that would weigh 26 pounds. So, I just stopped wondering. It never even crossed my mind for half a second that it could possibly have been a stand mixer. They're too expensive. My family couldn't possibly know just how passionately I wanted one. My sister constantly makes fun of my cooking hobby. They're WAY too expensive! So when I saw the KitchenAid box sitting on the counter, my really immediate thought was, "why did they package it in a stand mixer box?" This thought was not a very hearty one, in my defense. It pretty much immediately clicked that they got me a stand mixer. I yelled "HOLY CRAP!" and started crying in the middle of the lobby of the FedEx receiving warehouse.

I then cried for about another half hour.

The rest of my birthday was totally amazing as well. The weather was beautiful--it was a mild sunny day. Justin took me to U-District and got us delicious falafel and a visit to the Burke Museum of Natural History. Then, we headed over to Fremont and had the most beautiful pork sandwich in the WORLD from Paseo Seattle. It changed my life. I have had pork made by two different Cuban abuelas and each time, I thought that pork was the epitome of how pig should be made. This, however, blew them out of the water. There are no words. Suffice it to say the Cuban Roast actively made me not want to eat for the rest of the day, since to eat would mean washing that beautiful pork flavor out of my mouth and that would be a travesty.

However, cake called. I can't let cake ring to voicemail. I am only human.

I got other wonderful gifts from Justin and his family (a jar of marmite and a Good Eats collection from Justin and Back to Basics from his family which is a book about how to build a homestead in the wilderness, basically. It's a damn addictive read) and had and altogether amazing day. I am surrounded by the best people ever--even if many of them are 3,000 miles away.

For Justin's birthday, we did the Seattle Underground Tour which was fascinating and wonderful and full of whores. Well, the tour ITSELF wasn't necessarily full of whores, but the subject matter sure was. Yay logging/mining town! Apparently, for four years of this city's history, a $10 monthly tax on prostitution provided Seattle with 87% of its gross "manufacturing" revenue. Yeah.