The Bachelorette Cake

This is my friend/classmate Erin. She's getting married in 10 days.

(No, not to this guy, despite his oaken viking allure.)Naturally, we threw her a bachelorette party. (1960's themed because she loves the Beatles) Naturally, there were games at the party. The best one was inspired by cake. You see, as another friend of ours had been planning her own wedding a few years ago, she came across this designer cake. Yes, those are funky gray mushrooms plunked onto an otherwise okay cake. She thought it was the most hideous thing she'd ever laid eyes on. Inspired by the horrid mushroom cake, our bachelorette party game challenge was to make the ugliest wedding cake imaginable with a $5 budget, 45 minutes, a pre-cooked sheetcake, a tub of frosting, and variety pack of food coloring. Our group decided to make a replica of this outstanding Rochester, MN, landmark: The Corn Water Tower

We even smashed real corn into the frosting to give it the authenticity that any true cake masterpiece needs.

After an exciting judging by the party hostess' upstairs neighbor, Guido (an archetypically foreign middle-aged man wearing spandex shorts, a linen shirt unbuttoned halfway down, and a leather newsboy cap), we were declared the winners. Ugly cake prizes for all!

Here's the runner-up entry, complete with a Dollar Store cake topper in which the bride is pregnant:

Spider Man

I came home from the hospital today, went to punch in the front door code for the apartment building, and suddenly encountered this foul beast behind the plastic in the right-hand side of the display:

Can't see the grossness? Let me zoom in.

And zoom again.

Although I have to admire the ingenuity of the little guy -- what with finding a way off the ground, through the wall, behind the box wiring, and into the enclosed display screen, then having the audacity to build a web there -- the fact still remains that he's a fat, repusively beige, loathesome arachnid.

I honestly can't decide whether I'm impressed or grossed out.

Baby shower, and Speed-eating power!

The awesome girlies in my class will take any opportunity to get together. And if we're getting together, there's usually a costume theme. These pics are from Erica's baby shower. Since she's a classy girl from Tennessee the theme was Southern Belle (hence the flowered dresses and froofy garden-party hats). Not everyone had a southern belle outfit, but Erica also likes horses so we expanded the theme to include that (hence the cowgirl costumes). And I didn't have either type of costume, so I went as Taco Bell instead of Southern Belle (hence the packet of mild sauce pinned to my shirt). The coolest part of the shower was that she requested that we write our messages in children's books instead of on cards, so she came away from the baby shower with a great little library of books to read to the baby. It's such a great idea! She liked the cake!

We also played a new twist on the classic baby shower game -- you know, the one in which you taste a mystery baby food and guess the flavor? Except they made it into competitive speed-eating, where one teammate has to feed the other one the mystery baby food as fast as possible.

This is Molly, who mercilessly shoveled plum-apple goop down my throat. That look on my face is a mix of strangulation and competitiveness (it's hard to do Eye of the Tiger when you're choking on baby goop). Meanwhile, the look on Molly's face is pure sadistic joy.

And we clenched the victory!

Cake Fair, Mendelssohn Aire, and the Handy-Dandy Bedside Chair

1. Diaper Cake My classmate's wife is having a baby girl, and what could be more practical than diapers as a baby shower gift? Thank you for teaching me how to to make this diaper cake, Bonnie! 2. Opera Lite My church group went to see Mendelssohn's oratorio, "Elijah," this weekend. An oratorio is basically an opera, but without the costumes or choreography -- during Mendelssohn's time, the Catholic church frowned on gaudy pageantry during Lent, so the theatre houses came up with oratorios as a way to fill the season. I'm not normally into opera, but this one was amazing! They had a 50-piece orchestra, 100-person choir, and the program had every music lyric referenced back to the Bible verse it came from. 3. My new job as a delivery truck driver My friends have started to refer to my car as "The Hot Nazi," because of its German roots. (Maybe this new nickname is bad kharma coming back to bite me for all those times I referred to Katy's Z-car with the red velvet/leather interior as "The Brothel.") Anyway, this week, I was working with Mayo's home hospice department and they asked me if I could take my car to deliver something to one of the hospice patients' houses. After I agreed, I found out that the cargo was an adult bedside commode chair, and the delivery site was a farm way out in the boondocks at the end of a 6-mile dirt road. I'm happy to report that the Hot Nazi did just fine with this glamorous task. Potty delivery mission accomplished!

Redwing, Jenga Fling, Cookie Thing

Sometimes my life is lame, so even the highlights are kind of beige instead of neon. That disclaimer stated, here are some highlights from the past week anyhow:

1. Rock climbing outdoors

You may have heard a vicious rumor that Minnesota has no actual mountains. Well, it's true. But Redwing, MN, does have an awesome cliff-faced bluff with about a hundred different bolted sport climbs like these:

2. Dinner and game night

It turns out that my friends Jorge and Val play a really hard-core version of Jenga in which you stack the removed blocks back on top as badly and haphazardly as possible. Hence, the helically-skewed, triple-piled, antennae-topped wreck you see here, moments before it crashed to its death:

3. This hand-lettered sign for cookies

An innocent descriptor of the cookie variety? Or an ominous warning about where these cookies have been? I don't know. All I know is that there's a very unfortunate space in the middle of that first word there. And yes, I realize that giggling about this in the middle of the convenience store (...and then taking a picture of it, no less) makes me, like, 6 years old.

My Pseudo-Disney Non-Vacation

Have you heard of that getting-to-know-you game called "I've Never"? A group of people sit in a circle of chairs with one less chair than the number of people, then the leftover person has to stand in the middle of the circle and say something they've never done. Anyone sitting down who has done the stated activity has to get out of their chair and scramble into a new one, leaving a new person leftover in the middle of the circle. Well, my go-to statement for that game has always been that I've Never been to a Disney theme park. And even though I spent the last 4 days in Orlando, FL, it's still true. I was there for a research conference, but didn't actually get to do anything legitimately Disney. Instead, I had a pseudo-Disney vacation during breaks between conference lectures! Wooo-hooooo, Behold! I took a picture of a Disney park transportation bus as it drove by! I explored the boardwalk studded with tacky souvenir shops near Disney World! I snapped a shot of Disney's Epcot Center! (...from the highway, across a parking lot, while lost, moments before doing a U-turn in my rental car in order to avoid having to actually pay to get inside the official park). Squint and look in the middle of the picture just above the treeline! I went inside of a Disney resort hotel! The Swan & Dolphin! (...it's where the conference was held. My actual hotel lodgings were much less Disney and much less dinero.) Swan: Dolphin: And by the way: I'm no marine biologist, but that's no dolphin. Maybe they didn't think "The Swan & Trout" sounded as classy.

In a suspenseful pseudo-Disney climax, I presented my research project at the biggest national pediatric eye conference of the year!

The project was on acquired nonaccommodative esotropia (translation: kids who suddenly go cross-eyed even though their eyes were straight before, and the crossing can't be fixed with strong glasses).

And in a super pseudo-Disney happy ending, my poster won an award for Best in Show! (Look closely at the upper left corner of the picture and you'll see a cute little blue ribbon on the display board.) The last time I won anything "Best in Show" was at the poultry barn of the 1995 county fair for a pair of cantankerous geese. The fair folks gave me a $3 prize. The ophtho research conference folks only gave me a hearty handshake. Apparently, the more lucrative career is in poultry, not medicine.

Clichés about life

It's impossible to fully appreciate Spring unless you've lived in Minnesota. The wintertime here is so long and bitterly cold -- months of frigid wind and ice, all the trees bare, all the ground covered with 2 feet of accumulated snow from November to March. If you go outside for 30 seconds with wet hair, it flash freezes into crunchy icicles (...hair-cicles?). The piles of plowed snow on the sides of the road are taller than I am, and all full of muck and road salt and little things that froze to death. There is nothing alive out there. It's inconceivable that anything could possibly survive. Then suddenly one day the sun comes out and the snow melts. The next day, the grass is green. The next week, the great outdoors is packed with squirrels, bunnies, and little chirpy birds like something straight out of a Disney cartoon. The week after that, the trees bust out into so many flowers they weigh the branches down. It's like life returns with a vengeance, desperate to prove that it's vigorous and vital, even after what it had to endure all winter. Spring here is more than a season, it's a resurrection. Never ceases to amaze me.