- Posts
- 1,954
- Likes
- 5,908
SC1
·Long fυcking Post - Apologies In Advance
So a few of you might remember a recent thread whereby I was digging deep into my brain to figure out how to dazzle my wife for our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary...
as is the case around here, we don't usually end up celebrating anything on its actual date but in fact late and in some cases "over multiple days" (this is a symptom of a marriage between an RN (she) and a Teflon-scheduled jazz musician (me)... we have been known to use up an entire week to celebrate a single birthday and more than a half a dozen times we've celebrated Christmas as late as late January. Rather sad but true).
Additionally, some of you may recall that I bailed on the purchase of a new DJ36 to instead redirect the funds + additional towards a diamond for my wife: 3.27 carat round diamond in a 4 prong platinum setting (I promised her a diamond ring someday -- 25 years later I'm making good on that promise).
The ring is finally "out for delivery" today here in New Mexico after waiting for the stone to be shipped from Southern France to New York City where the jeweler would do his thing and then set it & size it.
It was ordered on April 24th and with our anniversary on May 2nd I held little hope for this important date to be the one that landed on the bull's-eye... it didn't, oh well.
So taking yet another page from our well-worn playbook I also decided to track down and order the exact cake that we had for our wedding so many years ago... was not easy. The bakery still operates but the actual baker of our cake from a quarter century ago had retired. After turning on as much charm as I have left in myself I was able to get a home telephone number for the retired baker from the very skeptical bakery owner.
It was a weird yet challenging cold call to make. And amazingly it went well.
She agreed to bake it. The plan was simple: she would bake the cake at her home on Sunday April 30th in the AM. Wrap it in plastic wrap and freeze it to rock solid for the long & warm journey from Michigan to New Mexico and then have her former employer ship it on May 1st UPS 2nd Day.
8 inch round chocolate cake, buttercream, two layers, handmade white chocolate shavings -- an amazing cake that we loved back then and I knew my wife would go crazy enjoying 25 years after the fact while I no longer eat that kinda stuff ~ all the more for her to eat. 25 years back it was pricey for our means at $65.00.
This time around it would be $100 for the cake, $125 for shipping.
What could possibly go wrong when so much was going right?
Much.
Cake shipped out, clock starts ticking...
Wife also adores my homemade lasagna -- which I've made her precisely two times in the 25 years we've been legally bound to one another. Why? Because while she loves it and I love her I hate making it... making lasagna noodles from scratch is about as much fun as sitting in the doctor's office next to a lady hacking up phlegm who is playing Candy Crush Saga on her phone while waiting to have your prostate checked.
But I love my wife so I made the plan and resigned myself to banging out lasagna on the cake's arrival date, May 3rd.
Only one day past our anniversary and the ring was going to take a while so all is good.
The cake got stuck in Indianapolis for an entire day. fυck.
It was now due May 4th. Didn't really care about pushing back Cake & Lasagna Day by a day but what was more concerning ~ was the cake packed well, dry ice keeping things cold?
May 3rd began with a notice from UPS, "Your package is now scheduled for delivery on May 5th" Seriously? What the fυck? I couldn't even bitch to my wife because, well, that would give up the surprise. This was going south fast. The cake would be an 8 inch round of slow death and instead of celebrating our marriage I would be poisoning my wife and sending her to work not as an employee but as a goddamn patient.
Two hours later there was a knock at the door. Opened it to see a UPS truck driving away, and on our baking hot sidewalk (85 degrees that day) was a box with bright red arrows pointing up but facing down with bold red Sharpie stating, upside for me, "THIS SIDE UP, PLEASE HANDLE WITH CARE, WEDDING CAKE, PERISHABLE!"
Relieved but equally dismayed I rushed it indoors and tucked it into the fridge ~ wanting to cool it down way more than face the carnage of what resided inside the abused and ignored box.
Off to the supermarket I went for all the lasagna ingredients... today was the day.
Later that evening, post lasagna & cake, I was told things I don't hear often in our marriage ~ she's an RN after all, Trauma/Burn & PACU, so she's not big into "squishy soft" verbalizations... I accept it because there are about a million other amazing things to her ~ what I mean to her, how much she loves me, what I do for her. It was good. It was all I needed. No material gift could equal that.
She swooned over the lasagna, and after trying her best to empathize over the cake disaster story she just mostly laughed -- eventually to the point of tears while eating it, lavishing over how amazing it tasted/how it immediately transported her back to Ann Arbor Michigan a quarter of a century ago when she was just 32 and me 34 years old, both of us so young with so many dreams ahead of us - so much life to live together - while not giving the faintest shit about food poisoning (and she still hasn't gotten sick nearly a week later while still chipping away at the cake slice by slice daily).
Photos or it didn't happen...
The lasagna:
The fυcked (but apparently, according to The Bride, absolutely delicious) cake (that yes, should be round -and- white but the butter in the buttercream separated due to heat during shipping):
...and because this fυcking post took me forever to write, guess what -- her ring just arrived, thats what!
So tonight when I present her with the ring and some champagne it will close down what was all supposed to take place on May 2nd.
May 9th, eight days total for a celebration, not bad based on our previous track records.
So a few of you might remember a recent thread whereby I was digging deep into my brain to figure out how to dazzle my wife for our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary...
as is the case around here, we don't usually end up celebrating anything on its actual date but in fact late and in some cases "over multiple days" (this is a symptom of a marriage between an RN (she) and a Teflon-scheduled jazz musician (me)... we have been known to use up an entire week to celebrate a single birthday and more than a half a dozen times we've celebrated Christmas as late as late January. Rather sad but true).
Additionally, some of you may recall that I bailed on the purchase of a new DJ36 to instead redirect the funds + additional towards a diamond for my wife: 3.27 carat round diamond in a 4 prong platinum setting (I promised her a diamond ring someday -- 25 years later I'm making good on that promise).
The ring is finally "out for delivery" today here in New Mexico after waiting for the stone to be shipped from Southern France to New York City where the jeweler would do his thing and then set it & size it.
It was ordered on April 24th and with our anniversary on May 2nd I held little hope for this important date to be the one that landed on the bull's-eye... it didn't, oh well.
So taking yet another page from our well-worn playbook I also decided to track down and order the exact cake that we had for our wedding so many years ago... was not easy. The bakery still operates but the actual baker of our cake from a quarter century ago had retired. After turning on as much charm as I have left in myself I was able to get a home telephone number for the retired baker from the very skeptical bakery owner.
It was a weird yet challenging cold call to make. And amazingly it went well.
She agreed to bake it. The plan was simple: she would bake the cake at her home on Sunday April 30th in the AM. Wrap it in plastic wrap and freeze it to rock solid for the long & warm journey from Michigan to New Mexico and then have her former employer ship it on May 1st UPS 2nd Day.
8 inch round chocolate cake, buttercream, two layers, handmade white chocolate shavings -- an amazing cake that we loved back then and I knew my wife would go crazy enjoying 25 years after the fact while I no longer eat that kinda stuff ~ all the more for her to eat. 25 years back it was pricey for our means at $65.00.
This time around it would be $100 for the cake, $125 for shipping.
What could possibly go wrong when so much was going right?
Much.
Cake shipped out, clock starts ticking...
Wife also adores my homemade lasagna -- which I've made her precisely two times in the 25 years we've been legally bound to one another. Why? Because while she loves it and I love her I hate making it... making lasagna noodles from scratch is about as much fun as sitting in the doctor's office next to a lady hacking up phlegm who is playing Candy Crush Saga on her phone while waiting to have your prostate checked.
But I love my wife so I made the plan and resigned myself to banging out lasagna on the cake's arrival date, May 3rd.
Only one day past our anniversary and the ring was going to take a while so all is good.
The cake got stuck in Indianapolis for an entire day. fυck.
It was now due May 4th. Didn't really care about pushing back Cake & Lasagna Day by a day but what was more concerning ~ was the cake packed well, dry ice keeping things cold?
May 3rd began with a notice from UPS, "Your package is now scheduled for delivery on May 5th" Seriously? What the fυck? I couldn't even bitch to my wife because, well, that would give up the surprise. This was going south fast. The cake would be an 8 inch round of slow death and instead of celebrating our marriage I would be poisoning my wife and sending her to work not as an employee but as a goddamn patient.
Two hours later there was a knock at the door. Opened it to see a UPS truck driving away, and on our baking hot sidewalk (85 degrees that day) was a box with bright red arrows pointing up but facing down with bold red Sharpie stating, upside for me, "THIS SIDE UP, PLEASE HANDLE WITH CARE, WEDDING CAKE, PERISHABLE!"
Relieved but equally dismayed I rushed it indoors and tucked it into the fridge ~ wanting to cool it down way more than face the carnage of what resided inside the abused and ignored box.
Off to the supermarket I went for all the lasagna ingredients... today was the day.
Later that evening, post lasagna & cake, I was told things I don't hear often in our marriage ~ she's an RN after all, Trauma/Burn & PACU, so she's not big into "squishy soft" verbalizations... I accept it because there are about a million other amazing things to her ~ what I mean to her, how much she loves me, what I do for her. It was good. It was all I needed. No material gift could equal that.
She swooned over the lasagna, and after trying her best to empathize over the cake disaster story she just mostly laughed -- eventually to the point of tears while eating it, lavishing over how amazing it tasted/how it immediately transported her back to Ann Arbor Michigan a quarter of a century ago when she was just 32 and me 34 years old, both of us so young with so many dreams ahead of us - so much life to live together - while not giving the faintest shit about food poisoning (and she still hasn't gotten sick nearly a week later while still chipping away at the cake slice by slice daily).
Photos or it didn't happen...
The lasagna:
The fυcked (but apparently, according to The Bride, absolutely delicious) cake (that yes, should be round -and- white but the butter in the buttercream separated due to heat during shipping):
...and because this fυcking post took me forever to write, guess what -- her ring just arrived, thats what!
So tonight when I present her with the ring and some champagne it will close down what was all supposed to take place on May 2nd.
May 9th, eight days total for a celebration, not bad based on our previous track records.
