Heaneyland!

35 and counting

So Rose threw a birthday party for me this weekend, and it was awesome. You may recall that I posted this cartoon not so long ago. Well, Rose included a link to it in the party invitation, and I have since learned that when you post a wish list online, things get done. Did I get CDs? Yes I did. I finally got a copy of Camper Van Beethoven's "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart", and James brought me a CD by someone he discovered and thought I would like (Vic Thrill) -- and he was correct, I like it very much. What about ties? Well, the boxes weren't bottomless, but I did get quite a few ties, all just my sort of thing, one of which was emblazoned all over with little drawings of Oscar the Grouch.

But surely no one brought me a red panda, right? Well, check this out!

Yes, that is correct -- you are looking at a cake topped with a red panda made of many different colors of melted chocolate. So. Fucking. Amazing. Our friend Amber made and frosted the cake (with a delicious coffee-flavored cream cheese icing) and Mary made the panda.

Okay, okay, so I got a red panda. But a swing set made of chocolate? That's not even--

Yes. In addition to baking the cake, Amber also made me a Hershey's Special Dark swing set. I am still in awe about the whole thing. My friends are the coolest.

Other snippets about the party and the preparations for it:

Rose and I savvily ordered most of our party supplies from Fresh Direct, to save me from carrying five bottles of soda and three six-packs and god knows what-all else back from the grocery store. Unfortunately, they screwed up our order, forgetting the cranberry juice and accidentally misreading the "one six-pack of Brooklyn Brown Ale" as "one bottle of Brooklyn Brown Ale" (this is especially mystifying because they do not sell beer by the bottle). So I still ended up carrying way too much stuff back from the store, in the rain. Bleh.

I did manage to complete my shopping trip in less time than it takes to play the Futureheads CD, which was good, because the rest of the time for the party was allotted for cleaning, and there was a lot of it to do. The most obsessive moment of my cleaning process was, I believe, when I washed my mouse pad. (But it was filthy! And now it is beautiful!)

While setting up for the party, I left one magazine on the table: a copy of Action Pursuit Games magazine that I found on the street one day and picked up for amusement value. I did this just in hopes that someone would see it, fail to notice that it was from 2001, and ask about it; happily, someone did. Carrie spotted the magazine and asked me, "Who's the paintball enthusiast?" and I was off. "Oh," I said, deadpan, "That's me. Yeah, ever since I started working at Conde Nast I've totally gotten into it. It's weird, there's this whole paintball culture there. We play the other magazines once a week. Last week we played Vogue and we kicked their asses. Glamour is the worst, though; those guys fight dirty." She was still with me (although Charles/Ugarte thought I gave away the game as soon as I said we played every week, and he's dead right; I should have claimed that there was a match every week, but that each magazine played, like, once every two months) and asked where you can play paintball in the city. At this point I confessed that I had been making everything up. Someone else complained, "Hey, April Fool's Day was yesterday," and I replied, "That's true, but my birthday is April Fool's Day, and we are celebrating my birthday today, so I consider this to be April Fool's Day (observed)." It's sophistry like that which makes people want to spend time making me red pandas and swing sets, I'm sure.

Posted by Francis at 11:38 AM