XLII

So, yeah, yesterday was my birthday. Was still feeling kinda rundown and blah and not wanting to do anything, so I didn't, particularly. Talked to my sister and parents' on the phone. The mail brought me a box from my brother, and coffee, and the rest of my worm bin parts, so that was highly successful. I made myself some chicken soup with rice for lunch, very Maurice Sendak and no doubt therapeutic. I make pretty kickass chicken soup if I do say so myself.

H and I had a tradition that he would bake me a cake on my birthday, [and I would bake him a chocolate cake for his birthday, veen if we went out to eat and he got cake or fancy dessert some other way, which started because his mother would inevitably want to have him over or take him out for his birthday and would say"I thought about getting you a cake, but no one likes chocolate cake" which just seemed like the most absurd thing, so I promised him I would always make sure he had chocolate cake even if no one likes it {the year I tried to make it all fancy with cake flour and pricey chocolate in my usual recipe and the whole thing crumbled to pieces and had to be turned into trifle was a big hit, for example}] but he had some sort of mental block about baking and would only make cakes where the ingredients come out of boxes and you follow the directions printed on the side. Which was why we got the kosher-for-passover Manishevitz cakes every year - no corn starch/corn syrup. Last year he tried his hand at Trader Joe's microwave brownie, which was actually pretty good. So, instead of cake, this year I had cookies, the last of the IT'S IT double chocolate mint chip cookies that we got the week before he died that go from freezer to oven. That seemed like the closest i could get to H baking for me.

So, quiet day, but good. I let myself off the hook for all the stuff I should be doing all the time, mostly, and that's always nice. But I need to get back to doing those things today...