caracolina

So I finally made it. I turned 40 years old today. I am my old man’s old lady, one could say. But frankly, I feel great, better than ever. And John came up with a huge surprise that really helped sweeten the deal. Yes, in spite of giving me the speech a couple weeks ago that I better not be disappointed because he didn’t have any presents or surprise for me he went all out and showered me with gifts that go beyond the monetary.

In the morning he gave me a present, a cute Hello Kitty lap table, for making sandwiches in the car. That was a really nice idea since usually I end up spreading mustard over the map, my pant legs, and whatever the knife or the mustard bottle decides to roll over. The odd thing though was that John handed me a card that was decidedly unromantic. It just had a big 40 printed on it and there were no personal words inside AT ALL. I thought that was a bit fishy, but oh well, at least there was a card, right?

Hours later at the office, the engineering team piled into Alan’s truck to go for lunch. Alan had worked on me for weeks to decide where to go for my birthday lunch, so I relented and voted for Pei Wei. At some point though I noticed that we were still on the 101, heading for our exit at Cave Creek, which meant that we had overshot our destination. Innocently I asked “what are we doing here….?” and Alan divulged that John had wanted to join us for lunch and asked to be picked up. Oh well, no reason to become really suspicious – yet. However, as we pulled up to our apartment and I didn’t see John outside I was beginning to have second thoughts. After all, why couldn’t he meet us somewhere? Wouldn’t we have to drop him back off at he house after lunch? We pulled up in front of our stairs and Alan said “Go, grab him.” But as I was halfway up the stairs, the truck sped off. Well, now something was certainly up and I resolutely stepped up to the landing. What I saw was that our door was covered with a long printout with remarks about turning forty, including to take a deep breath (40 if I needed), close my eyes and come in, so I followed instructions and opened the door.

When I opened my eyes I couldn’t believe what I saw. John had strung several pieces of fishing wire across the room and presents were dangling from them. Tons of presents. They were numbered with star-shaped post-it notes. I got to open them one by one starting with #1, a huge, custom-made, beautiful, super-romantic card which made me cry. Then it was on to books and magazines about spinning and dyeing, all the tools and gadgets that I had talked about buying but hadn’t gotten around to yet, tons of fiber, cotton, flax, hemp, silk. I welled up a few more times when I carefully opened all those beautifully wrapped presents (all different paper, too).

Finally, the last present was outside. John had sanded and finished our old gardening shelf in the last weeks and stocked it with everything needed for dying fiber, gloves, masks, pots, bowls, even a microwave, hotplate, and crockpot. He made me my own dye lab! I can’t believe I didn’t realize that I hadn’t looked out on the back balcony in weeks! The amount of intelligence that went into this is staggering. I feel incredibly lucky, not just because I just got a load of presents (and I here I was in the morning, explaining to coworkers that I don’t care much about material things, ha!) but because I have a guy that cares enough for me to go through months/weeks of secret preparation to surprise the living daylights out of me. Needless to say EVERYONE else knew but me. He chatted with a number of people at the local yarn stores (LYS) as well as out of state places to get me the best of everything. I love you, Jaanu! Thanks is a word that seems small in the face of this huge effort.