Happy birthday Rick!

Today is Rick’s birthday – he took the day off from work… not just because it’s his birthday, but also because he intends to celebrate tonight by taking a final exam in his financial/accounting/business class. (I can’t remember what the class is called, exactly… something that has to do with finance or accounting or business or some other subject that interests me about as much as watching water evaporate…) So he’s studying for his test, which he’s convinced he’ll fail horribly. I don’t see how that will happen, though, seeing as he has an A average. And the professor sounds like a bit of a dimwit, so that should help, too. According to Rick, she tends to ramble off on tangents that have nothing to do with the subject she is paid to teach (although really, I’m not sure I can blame her – if I had to talk about finance for a couple hours, I’m sure I would be tempted to change the subject, too…).

For instance – last week, Rick told me she started talking about environmental issues for some unknown reason (how do you go from finance to the environment?), and made the mistaken assertion that bald eagles are an “endangered” species. In actuality, they’re no longer considered endangered – they haven’t been endangered for over a decade. They’re now “threatened,” which is one step up from endangered. And they may not even be considered “threatened” much longer – the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to decide whether to remove bald eagles from the threatened/endangered list altogether. Rick’s professor then proceeded to claim that no bald eagles have been born in the wild in thirty years, or some such nonsense. I guess she’s never been to Alaska, where bald eagle’s nests are scattered all over the place. Or Montana, where dad has a bald eagle’s nest on his property. Or probably any of a myriad of other places in the Pacific Northwest where bald eagles are hatching on a regular basis. Honestly, when I hear about college professors who are so uninformed (or perhaps incapable of simple research), it makes me wonder why they’re teaching at all…

Anyway, so like I said, Rick took the day off so he could study before his class tonight. This is one of the reasons why I always loved my birthday when I was a kid – when you have a July birthday, you never have to go to school on your birthday. I knew I would always have the day off, no matter what day of the week my birthday happened to fall on. Of course, it also meant that I was never the kid who got to bring cupcakes for the whole class. Everyone else got to celebrate their birthdays at school with all their classmates, but I never got to hear the whole class sing “happy birthday” to me. I guess there were pros and cons to the summer birthday…

I still remember how my second grade teacher Mrs. Barkow used to bring out a strange, yellow, fake birthday cake every time it was someone’s birthday. I think it must’ve been paper-mache or something… it was yellow and had pink trim and possibly a few little plastic people on top… I can’t remember exactly. But I DO remember thinking it was such a mean thing to do – to always bring out that fake, inedible cake instead of just making a real one. (What, you can’t just bake a real cake? You can’t just buy a Betty Crocker mix and throw it in the oven?) And along with the fake cake, Mrs. Barkow would recite a weird little poem about birthdays in a breathy, happy, animated voice – something about how every day of every year, someone has a birthday, everywhere around the world, blah blah… okay, I obviously don’t remember it exactly. But every time someone in the class had a birthday, it would seem like we were all participants in some kind of secret birthday ceremony. Out came the fake cake, the sacred birthday poem was recited, and, if we were lucky, someone’s mom sent their kid to school with actual birthday-related food. If we WEREN’T lucky, we’d get to stare at the paper-mache cake and think of how good it would taste if that yellow frosting was real. (I used to think that maybe paper-mache wouldn’t taste THAT bad… I mean, maybe if we just asked the cafeteria ladies for some sugar and a stick of butter – we could make it work.)

But, since today is Rick’s birthday and last week was mom’s birthday, I made a birthday key lime pie yesterday. We took it over to mom and dad’s house for dinner last night, and even though it was just the four of us, the pie mysteriously disappeared before the night was over. I think we can blame that on the sad Yankee loss last night. When the Boston Red Sox hit four home runs in a row, you’re entitled to an extra slice of pie… that’s my new rule… :)