yay! amber made it!

i’ve discovered two things about myself recently: i am not original and i can no longer keep a secret to surprise my wife. both of these realizations came as i prepared to honor my beautiful amber for her 26^th year of not dying. in days of old, living to the ripe old age of 26 was so unheard of that, very ironically, it would get you killed during monthly town witch hunts. (source: the salem gazette, issue 27, 30 feb 1683) so in honor of such a great accomplishment, i had to do something special. problem was i used my best (and only) ideas last year and i had no clue of what to do this year. i also had the extremely daunting task of trying to keep par with amber after the awesome birthday she gave me.
the first obstacle was getting work off so i could be with her. i wanted to keep it a surprise, but sure enough, i can’t do that anymore. i cannot keep a straight face with that woman for longer than 3 seconds. this unprofessional fault of mine haunted me yet again as i attempted to make a dvd of our wedding for her, complete with our photo slideshow and wedding video, including all the bells and whistles (cool menus, a soundtrack, dvd cover, etc.) unfortunately, she caught me in the act of making it, and instead of being smooth and cleverly hiding what i was doing, i sung like celine dion on canadian boxing day (i have no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it sounded snappy and i like it. J) so i showed all of my project to her right then and there and ruined what was supposed to be my “special” present for her.

our weekend began on friday with a drive to the utah arts festival in salt lake. one of my sister-in-law’s many weird habits is belly dancing (love ya sherry), and she was performing. sidenote: there are a lot of weird people in this world… and all of them seem to like art festivals… and not to like showers. well as luck would have it, right as their performance ended, the clouds rolled in and it began to POUR! as luck would not have it though, we were parked four blocks away. at least we got our exercise for the day as we sprinted to our car in the typhoon. we then all met at my sister’s place for a little party. played some games, ate some food, watched some tv, and socialized. we spent the night there, did a round of golf in the morning, then headed up to my cousin’s house in logan for another party. played some games, ate some food, amber rode a horse, and socialized. we came home that evening, hit the sack, and arose the next morning for church.

for breakfast, i thought i'd make her german pancakes. i've never heard of them, but amber once said they she loved them, so i gave it a try. to my horror, i pulled them out of the oven and what once was just an interesting looking batter had now become an alien birth pod! i was just about to throw it out when amber ensured me that's how they're supposed to be. they were pretty good. after that, it was off to church.

then the real work began, as well as my unoriginality. i dropped amber off at relief society, then hurried home and built a big fort in our living room (stole the idea from ‘the holiday’). dragged out our mattress, hung some sheets and christmas lights, worked up a good sweat, laid out a couple gifts, then back to church. a couple hours later and we’re heading home, my excitement barely being contained. she walks in and beholds castle ambott. we crawl in and on the mattress are 103 pieces of candy, each with a different reason why i love her (stole the idea from amber – she did this for me last valentines). we then opened her presents which included a movie, a book, and a new “special” present – a coupon book (again, stole the idea from amber – she did this for me for my birthday last year), which included coupons for a new skirt, swimsuit, shoes, and a few other things that you need to mind your own business about. J after presents, we watched a movie in our fort, had dinner, birthday pie, and games with her family, then ended the night with some ice cream cake, one of the few cakes that my cake-hater wife likes.

i apologize to amber that i’m neither the most creative of men, nor the most original. and i know it’ll only get worse as the years go by. i should have set the bar really low here at the beginning and pretended to have forgotten the day all together. J