Birthdays and Apple Butter

This weekend was a blur of birthday celebrations and, as always, over eating. It all started with my birthday on Friday. Erin and I had a wonderful lunch at the best Thai restaurant in Indy -- Sawasdee. This place is a jewel of a restaurant, with every dish being reasonably priced at lunch and offering the same portions as the dinners. The owner is a very nice gentleman named, humorously, Ty. During lunch Erin reminded me that I would be spending my birthday evening at a tailgate before her school's football game. Erin has a knack for becoming the moderator of most every club at her school at one point or another, so this year she is performing these duties for the Junior class. In addition to having to organize prom, she also got to organize this tailgate. The star attraction of the evening was one of those giant inflatable jumping rooms, only this was no ordinary jumping, er, room. Instead it was a giant cow turned on it's back so that 6 foot tall high school boys could engage their hormones in a disturbing way by jumping around on its udders, slamming into each other in the process. They dang near killed the poor thing. At one point, a kid fell into the udders and his body weight propelled him to the ground. Erin immediately assumed the kid was suffocating in the inflatable udder (some sentences you never expect to write) and leaped into the cow to save him. He was fine, without her assistance, but I've never seen Erin move so quickly unless trying to get her hands around my throat (usually following a blog entry...My wife is actually a very calm, mild person. I only occasionally drive her to madness.) Anyway, the kids seemed to love stomping on the udders, and they politely wished me a happy birthday before retreating to their friends to say "Did you see Mrs. Hawkins' husband? It must, like, totally suck to be like, so old." Responded to with an appropriate "Fo shizzle."

On Saturday we had a birthday celebration for all of the September birthdays in our family at my parent's house. My dad, grandfather, sister, several cousins, an aunt here or there, and myself all have September birthdays in my family, and it didn't occur to me until sometime during high school that this, coupled with the fact that most of the people in my family are teachers, probably means that everyone in my family for several generations now has looked forward with great delight to Christmas vacation. I'll say no more. I'd like to thank everyone for the gifts that I received. My dad and I were both given large quantities of candy by various unnamed mother-in-laws who are apparently somewhat interested in hastening the process of both tooth decay and heart disease in their son-in-laws. Thanks again for a wonderful birthday.

On Sunday morning, we arose to beautiful weather, so after church Erin and I headed for the Oliver Winery in Bloomington. We did a brief tasting, and since my palette for wines is as finely tuned as a Ford Pinto, I had to at least once spit a large volume of wine out into the little, er, wine spittoon crying out, "You call this wine? I wouldn't wash down a White Castle with this swill!" just to look like I knew what I was talking about. Actually I politely swished each glass, as though I knew it needed to be properly swished before consumption in one large gulp, and asked for the next one on the list. It was fun.

After leaving Oliver, we headed over to McCormick's Creek State Park, just west of Bloomington. As we approached the entrance to the park, I spied a sign at the side of the road for the Apple Butter Festival in Spencer, just a few miles up the road. Given our love of a weekly elephant ear, I could tell that this sign had effectively derailed our day of hiking that we had planned. Forging ahead, we entered the park and took off on a trail. I'll post some pictures of some of this stuff this evening. What we discovered is that the DNR has chosen to build massive rickity stair cases, rather than clear good trails up and down the hills in McCormick's Creek. After hiking for a while, checking out an abandoned quarry (a common occurence in southern Indiana), and climbing approximately 400 stairs, we packed ourselves into the car for a cool, refreshing glass of Apple Butter.

The one thing you cannot get, ironically, at Owen County's Apple Butter Festival is apple butter. After walking through a handful of booths surrounding the court house offering various homemade baked goods and an occasionally obscene T-shirt, we headed for the lineup of food trailers that occupies space at every good festival. We found only one offering ANY kind of apple butter, and they were selling fried biscuits and apple butter for $1. After offering up a single, the woman behind the counter pulled out 4 greasy looking biscuits from a fryer, and then opened up a half empty jar of ValuRite Apple Butter from the nearest Aldi. I was incensed. Store bought apple butter didn't stop us from eating the fried biscuits, but it definitely put a damper on the festivities. After seeing my second or third "Heaven, Yeah! Hell NO" T-shirt, we retreated to the car for dinner at Gray's. As we left Owen County, I considered that perhaps there really are places where there is nothing for kids to do but sleep with each other and do drugs.

Pictures of the weekend festivities are forthcoming, but until then, it's back to life as a 31 year old engineer working for the Chinese man. In preparation for busines travel to China, I'm learning a few key phrases in Cantonese:

"Lei ho." -- "Hello."

"Ngoh ho hoi sum gin lei." -- "Nice to meet you."

"M goi." -- "Thank you."

"Doi m juu." -- "Excuse me..."

"Si soh hai bin do?" -- "Where is the toilet?"

"Joi gin." -- "Good bye."

This pretty well covers most of my conversations. Have a great day!