Pre-Birthday

People, today has been a day to top. The perfect mixture of busyness and relaxation, purpose and loafing. And tomorrow! Is my birthday! Which means today wasn’t even the day I get a massage. It’s enough to make a person count her many blessings.

With the exception of yesterday, which was sort of ruined by a blizzard, this weekend has been pretty remarkable — simply because it’s my birthday run-up, and I have birthday issues. They don’t have so much to do with getting older (except that it keeps happening! I get older every year, people!); I would say it’s to do with expectations, but it’s much more vague than that. I’m going to stop trying to describe it (I’ve deleted several rewritten sentences already), and just say this: meh.
But this year I had a very enjoyable outing with my friends on Friday evening, and today was also spent with friends, although not in a celebratory manner. It’s hard having a birthday close to a holiday — everybody always seems to flee the metro area, leaving me friendless. But I had some wonderful friend-time this year, so now my actual birthday-day can be spent with family, quite happily.
I’ve been going through a rough patch lately, but I think something is working. Because I remember last year, when my birthday cake wound up in the bin (frosting problems, cake problems; I gave up), how that managed to pull down my whole day, at least a little bit. And this year, when I took my cake out of the oven and saw this, I just laughed.
To be fair, I sort of expected that to happen, and I’m planning on frosting the sides of the cake tomorrow, so it didn’t need to come out of the oven looking perfect. (The top is streusel, in case you were wondering — it’s not THAT mangled!) I even put the cake tin on a cookie sheet so it wouldn’t burn when it overflowed.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in there. Prepare for things to go a bit wonky, and you might just wind up pleasantly surprised.
I just hope the cake is done in the middle!