Twinkies Day

Teri celebrated her 55th birthday Friday. Since April 6 is Twinkies Day, I made her the traditional Twinkies Cake, with five candles. Next year, since we are not really meant to eat this cake, and if it it turns into a plastic time bomb so be it, maybe I'll get all 56 candles to stick in the cake and light up, which will look like a porcupine on fire.

I also while shopping at a store the size of a factory farm found a kids' happy birthday kit. What a treasure. For a small price it included big rewards — five balloons, a banner to hang across the kitchen, plenty of colorful streamers. When Teri came home to the Beach Condo from a hard week of work, she was in for a surprise, with the extra bonus of a living blue hydrangea plant, our wedding flower in our wedding colors, that we can later transplant outdoors.

Later we went out for dinner at The Marc — the restaurant at the Marcus Whitman Hotel where Teri and I got engaged in February 2010. She ordered the Crater Lake buffalo (8) and I ordered the Cape Cod seafood (4). She had an amaretto sour and I had a Chivas Scotch (pricey). There I gave her the birthday gift — a necklace with a blue stone made from Mount St. Helens ash. Like the mountain, which erupted in May of 1980, both of us have had to rebuild our lives after devastating, cataclysmic events — job layoffs and the loss of Teri's mom and my first wife, Tina. We have sprung back from ashes to bloom again.