The belated celebrating has been had.

A long day at the office yesterday netted mixed results but I think we made some progress on one or two important issues. I achieved escape velocity from the office sometime around 1920 hours and made my way up to Kenosha, arriving something like an hour later. Even when I-294 is under construction I can still travel a great distance in reasonable time on it -- so long as I wait until after rush hour has finished.

I was hungry and the hour was late, so I convinced lady_curmudgeon to accompany me on a quick run for some fast food. When we returned from Burger King I handed her the drive-thru bag and asked her to carry it since there was a "heavier bag I forgot in the back of the truck." When I came around the front of the Expedition and she saw the huge bag with "Happy Birthday" written on it she just stared and said "Oh, my."

Before we had our late dinners she unwrapped her gifts. I think I surprised her with the vast range of items I'd managed to fit in there. Everything from ceramic painted cats (Think of the Chicago Cows On Parade art exhibit and you have the sense of how these cats were painted) to a wireless desktop to an iTunes gift card she can use to buy some new music. Perhaps the biggest surprise to Curmudgeon was the bag of Russel Stover sugarless chocolate truffles that I had put in there. She was sure she'd hate them simply on the merits of their being sugarless. None the less, I convinced her to try one and she spent the next five minutes boggling at how delicious it was. Do I know my lady, or what?

In other news this weekend will be spent in the usual way I spend my weekends in Kenosha: helping the Curmudgeon pack for her upcoming move to Z'ha'dum and maybe having dinner or coffee with some local friends -- assuming we don't get roped into putting some final finishing touches on the estate so Curmudgeon's brother can get it on the market. Of course no weekend of productivity like this is complete without a twist. This week's twist is that the last round of antibiotics given to Curmudgeon's primadonna cat (Aptly named "Diva") seem to have had no effect on what has now been diagnosed as a kidney infection. So a new round of meds are being applied and I'm the lucky cat daddy who gets to put them down her throat for the entirety of the weekend (as an amusing sidenote, I think 'mudge is envious because when pill time arrives Diva fights me less and I usually get the pill down her throat the first time, whereas for Curmudgeon there's lots of squirming, biting and several tries are necessary before the meds go down the hatch).

Build the robots