Happy birthday, Gwen

It wasn’t much.  Mom had to go to a dentist’s appointment in the morning, and it was somewhere between raining and threatening to rain, so she stopped at Albertson’s first to pick up a couple of ingredients for the crockpot and I went with her to pick up my medication refills – and I got a muffin for her birthday cake.  Then I walked to Rose City Cemetery from Albertson’s.

At least I could proudly report success.  Last night I had submitted the gargantuan scary class editing project that I’ve been sweating over for nine weeks, had submitted it complete and on time.  And now I’ll be able to go out there and read to her more, because I won’t be stuck at home neurotically trying to divide my time between working on the project and trying to work up the nerve to work on it.  

I think I did pretty well on the project.  *smiles*  (Not perfectly.  Naturally three minutes after I submitted it I knew of something that I had noticed but hadn’t marked.  But the hopeless text looked fairly human and readable when I was done with it.)

But, yeah, Gwen’s birthday kind of sucked.  It was the kind of thing where – you’ve seen this sort of disappointing birthday before, but it’s different when the birthday girl is underneath the lawn – where you get the feeling that the birthday girl isn’t saying anything, but there might be a teary sulk somewhere underneath.  The muffin was over-crusty and strange, some kind of blue flavor that wasn’t blueberry, and I left part of it sprinkled on Gwen’s grave for the crows.  And the ground was sopping, and I hadn’t brought the parachute chair because of the Albertson’s excursion, and then I only read three or four pages before I scowled and fled before the freshening possibility of more rain.  

I owe the girl better.  Not just more time without silly classwork chasms and longer reading stints – I should take her somewhere. 

One thing was the same as last year…  I told her I hadn’t gotten her anything.  She said that was okay, she didn’t get me a birthday present either.