I am now, as of yesterday, 35 years old. Not surprisingly, so far it feels absolutely no different than 34, which felt not a whit different than 33, which felt just about identical to 32, and, well, you get the idea. Yesterday was my birthday. There were presents. There was cake. There was a celebratory gathering of family. It was all good.

The day started, as most Sunday’s do, with me heading off to church for choir practice. Then I sat through a Sunday school discussion of the movie Chocolat, while figuring out how to knit beautifully invisible seams in my current sweater project. Then there was church and singing and then we got to go home and mill around frantically, Richard doing grill-related things while I wielded the vacuum cleaner against the evil forces of killer dust bunnies and did a few loads of laundry and dishes and basically tried to get the house in order so it would be presentable for guests. Oh, and in between church and cleaning there was lunch, which also involved singing of wait staff and free ice cream, but luckily no embarrassing hats.

Richard’s parents and little sister came up, and my parents and my older sister and her family came down for my birthday dinner. Richard did marinated pork on the grill, which always turns out delicious, and there was much boisterousness and chattering and noise that often accompanies gatherings of our families. There was an extremely large helium balloon shaped like a cactus, for some inexplicable reason, and an ice cream cake from Ben & Jerry’s with my new favorite flavor – Dublin Mudslide. There were presents – of course there were presents – and now I finally have a working blender again (the old one died months and months ago, leaving us unable to make potato cheese soup for far too long). Plus there was a very cool pewter goblet from Germany (handy to have a dad who gets sent to work in Munich on occasion, yes?), and season six of Buffy (which we have been waiting for to come out on DVD forever), and notices of subscriptions to many nifty and much-wanted magazines, and a sink-side composting bucket, and knitting books galore and even a s’more maker. Now I need some marshmallows and some Hershey bars and some Sterno and we will be all set for sticky, gooey goodness.

Today has been hot and sticky outside, which means that we have spent most inside, in some manner or another. The cats got me up early, as usual, so instead of going back to bed I whipped out a rough draft of the paper we’re working on at the office, so that I could feel like I’d done something vaguely productive for the day. Then we drove off to watch Shrek II, which is worth watching for no other reason than to see Antonio Bandaras as the best cartoon cat ever. And then there was much watching of Buffy, and pizza for dinner, and even though I feel as if – with the exception of today – this weekend has been all about the rushing around from here to there and being insanely busy, I must say that, when it comes to birthdays, my 35th was a pretty good one.

Good friends help you move. Real friends help you move your pregnant, laboring goat, which is leaking bodily fluids everywhere, into the shed where the vet has set up an emergency surgery center on a bale of straw. Even better friends hold your goat’s head and front legs while the vet slices open your goat mere inches away from their face to pull out the too-large (and sadly, dead) baby who was the cause of all the trauma in the first place, and then help load your groggy goat into a wheelbarrow and cart her down the road to the neighbor’s barn where there is a stall where she will have to convalesce.

This was not actually the reason we were there, I should point out. The actual reason for going over to our friends’ ranch this afternoon was for a barbeque. It was a gathering of our little social group from the church, and we got the tour of the ranch, where we all decided that someday we, too, are going to move onto a huge chunk of land with its own pond big enough to have its own little secret island and chock full of little fish, and its own orchard of every type of fruit and nuts imaginable. We also pretended that we were completely prepared for the phenomenal amount of work owning and maintaining such a property would be – a situation our host graciously accepted with laughter.

The trouble started when she mentioned that her tiny little Angora goat was in labor. Naturally as the afternoon progressed we would all linger around the goat pen, watching her to see if she’d made any progress. I’m not sure who it was who thought to see just how dilated she was, but that was when we discovered she wasn’t dilated at all, even though she was in heavy, straining labor. Discussion followed, considering that none of us really had a clue about livestock birthing, but we finally decided that a phone call to a large animal veterinarian was in order. The vet arrived, took one look at her nether regions, and stated that if the poor little thing didn’t have a c-section right away, she was not going to survive, because there was just no way she would ever be able to deliver that baby.

Goats, apparently, cannot be put completely under due to something about their lungs and their rumen and other sensitive areas. So the vet gave her some narcotics to make her dopey, and stuffed her side full of local anesthetics so she wouldn’t feel any pain, and between the small crowd of us we fetched the straw bale/operating table, and we carried the poor little goat over, and while one woman (who keeps sheep so was at least familiar with what to do in the birthing process) stood in waiting with a towel to deal with the baby, I crouched beside the goat’s head, keeping her calm and steady so she wouldn’t move around and also making sure to keep her head elevated so she wouldn’t have any problems. And the vet did not seem to mind at all that she had a small audience, fascinated with the little lesson in goat anatomy that was unfolding right in front of us.

The baby was far too big for momma to handle, which was really the problem. When she pulled it out, it was limp and pale; the vet thought it had already been dead perhaps a day, but luckily not long enough to start sickening the mom. I brushed flies away from the goat’s nose and ears and held her front legs in my hands to keep her from shifting and did my best to ignore the umpteen million pieces of straw that were digging their way into my wrist and arm underneath her head, and had an incredible view of the whole procedure. And then the vet sewed her up, first the uterus and then several other layers of membranes and skin, and we all held our breath as we gently lowered her from the straw bale onto her feet and she staggered for a bit, but ultimately was able to stand for a minute or two before sitting down in an exhausted heap.

Once the momma goat was settled into a clean stall and we’d all washed up and changed clothes as needed, we got back to the original reason we were there. Luckily there were enough of the group who were a little too squeamish for observing surgery who were perfectly willing to stay behind and keep all the little kids distracted, so there was a minimum of fuss from the younger contingent. We ate chicken and orzo salad and fruit and garlic cheese bread and followed that with brownies and ice cream and sat around together, and once it seemed that momma goat was going to be okay and we could all breathe a huge sigh of relief, and also, before it had really quite sunk in what just happened, we asked our hostess, for her next hosted gathering, just how she was ever going to be able to find entertainment to top what happened today.

It is strange to be home, and somehow a bit of a relief. There is a part of me that wishes above all else that we could have stayed another week, although by the time we left we’d seen everything there was to see in the little downtown and a few more days of milling aimlessly would have started to drive me batty. But if faced with impending boredom I’m sure we could have broken the ‘no driving’ rule and headed off to check out the surrounding area; see a little more of Oregon than what was along I-5, and the few blocks of Ashland where the theaters and our hotel were located.

Sunday was a day relegated to doing nothing but relaxing and being pampered. Somehow – and I am still trying to figure this one out – Richard agreed to do a spa package with me. So Sunday morning we walked across the street from our hotel to the spa, signed in, and before we knew it we were whisked off to a little room, where we changed into robes and slippers and then were given warm pillows to drape around our necks that smelled deliciously of cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves. This was followed by a brief stint in a steam room – an experience that reminded me rather uncomfortably of my trip to Singapore, what with the heat and the extreme humidity. Luckily it only lasted just about as long as I thought I could stand it, and we were ready for the next phase – a salt scrub that left my skin all tingly and soft. We showered off all the grit, and then settled in for a nice long massage, which was followed by the final step – a soak in a relaxing whirlpool tub full of steamy lavender. It was several hours of sheer bliss.

The rest of the day was devoted to quiet and relaxation. We ate at what became our favorite place to lunch – a completely vegetarian restaurant called Pilaf’s – and then settled in at the English style pub for some pick-up Celtic music, which consisted of a group of musicians who wandered in, joined the group, and sometimes even played the same song the rest of the group was playing. Richard poked around on his Clie, making use of the free wireless connection while I propped my feet up on another chair and happily knit away in time to the music. We had the most marvelous Italian food for dinner – pasta in sauces so creamy I had to savor every bite, followed by pears layered in chocolate cake. Throughout the day we did nothing in a hurry – just took our time and drifted from place to place.

Today was a little less relaxed, if only because today we drove back home. We would have managed to get an earlier start if I’d not noticed that the t-shirt I bought for myself at the guild gift shop was actually a child’s shirt, so we had to wait for the shop to open so I could exchange it. That gave Richard a chance to pick up a Shakespeare action figure, however, so I guess not all was lost. And then we stuffed everything back into the car, finished off the last of the Moose Munch, and got back on the freeway to head home.

The detour today was a stop to the caverns at Lake Shasta. I only knew they were there in the first place from a flyer a coworker had picked up for me when he was in the area a month or so ago, and we had seen a billboard for them on the way up. But on the way home there was not a single sign, and it was only through luck we happened to remember the name of the road we needed to turn on to. Once at the turnoff, it took a little bit of searching until we found some clue that we were headed in the right direction. There on the road sign, underneath all the little universal symbols for boating, camping, restrooms, and picnic tables, was a little outline of a person crouched over, wearing a hat with a lamp on it. Ah. Who knew there was a universal symbol for spelunking?

We got there a little too late for the 12pm tour, and were all set to sign up for the 1pm tour, except that it was chock full of hordes of extremely excited (and thus very energetic and noisy) second graders. So instead we bought tickets for the 2pm tour and set off again to find somewhere to get lunch. We found a restaurant by a bay full of houseboats and sat by the window while we ate, eying the boats and pondering what it would be like to live on one. And then we returned to the caverns, this time not needing to look for the sign of the spelunker to figure out where we needed to go, and joined a very small group of others as we trouped down to the lake’s edge and boarded the boat that took us across the lake to the caves. But not before I first climbed into a very cool tree house built for people far smaller than the average adult so Richard could take my picture. Is it not a nifty tree house? Yes. Yes it is.

Once off the boat and up a fairly steep hill we next boarded a rattley old bus that drove us up a windy and very steep road to the cave entrance, but then, finally, we got to go inside.

It’s dark in the caves, of course, and damp, since the constant dripping of water is how all those marvelous stalagmites and stalactites are formed. The tour guide was a cheerful young woman who rattled off all the important facts with good humor, and very nicely warned us every time we hit another round of stairs. There were, I should add, one heck of a lot of stairs. We started at the bottom of the caves and climbed up and up and up with every turn. I’d worried it would be chilly inside, but with all the climbing we were all plenty warm enough by the time we hit the largest cavern – the cathedral room. She turned on carefully concealed lights and pointed out clusters of bats on the ceiling that were so high up they looked like nothing more than oddly shaped ants crawling across the surface. Richard and I were good little tourists and took copious pictures, which was actually rather a test in faith. It was too dark to see anything through the viewfinder, so I resorted to pointing the camera in the general direction, pressing the button, and hoping when the flash lit up that I’d captured what I’d intended to photograph. Surprisingly, most of the time it worked. See?

And then it was time to leave, climbing back down just as many stairs, but all at once this time, and on the outside of the mountain, with occasional stops to look out over the beauty of Lake Shasta. Back down the hill on the bus, back across the lake on the boat, back up the ramps to the car, and back onto the freeway, on and on and on through a whole lot of small nondescript towns and great, vast expanses of boring nothing, until we finally made it home.

The past few days have been the most wonderfully relaxing days I’ve had in far, far too long. Switching hotels and moving to Ashland was the best thing we could have done. Everything is within easy walking distance of this hotel, even though it might occasionally be up some extremely steep hills (my calves still have not forgiven me for the hike up to the cabaret on Friday night!). The only time we’ve used the car since we got here was on Thursday morning, when we headed back to Medford to take the Harry and David factory tour. It being not a holiday weekend coming up, there were only four other people with us on the tour, which was nice (can you tell we don’t much like crowds?).

The tour was kind of fun. There was nothing exactly unexpected, since really, how exciting can it be to watch people stuffing boxes full of pears and chocolates, but it was lovely to walk into the building where they make the moose munch and the chocolate and just stand in the door and take deep breaths of those delicious aromas. And afterwards we wandered the Harry and David store and bought many bags of Moose Munch (most of which have since been consumed) and other goodies, and where I drooled over several varieties of roses (since Harry and David are also associated with Jackson & Perkins), even though I have very firm convictions on rose avoidance because plants which requires such constant care and maintenance scare me. But oh, there were some pretty ones – corals and dusky purples – that I was awfully tempted. We left the store before I weakened too far, but I did grab a few catalogs, just in case I change my mind later. Mm. Pretty flowers.

Over the past few days we’ve managed to meander all over the little downtown area that surrounds the theaters. It’s typically touristy, of course, but all the shops seem to be independently owned, so the only chain store we saw was the Starbucks. Every restaurant we’ve tried so far has been a delicious experience, and I feel as if I have not stopped eating since we got here. The moose munch back at the hotel room doesn’t help matters much either. I found the knitting store on our very first full day here, but so far have managed to buy nothing more than a set of circular needles. There are at least three used bookstores, one with its own large, gray, and extremely lazy cat, plus a marvelous children’s bookstore, where I could not help myself and had to buy something for an upcoming nephew’s birthday. Richard got to try steak and kidney pie at an English style pub, which also offers free wireless internet. Since we are such nerds we both brought our laptops with us, naturally we had to try this out.

We have also been seeing plays, which is, of course, the main reason we came up here. Thursday night was part one of King Henry the Sixth, done in a tiny theater with the actors on the floor right in front of us and the audience on either side of them. Unfortunately they’re not doing the second and third part of this trilogy until later in the summer, but it was so well done we may just have to schedule in another road trip to Ashland just to finish the story off. Friday afternoon we saw The Visit, which was marvelously dark, and followed that with a dinner theater at the Oregon Cabaret. The dinner itself would have been reason enough to go, but the play (They Came From Way Out There) was funny and clever, and I am not quite sure how I will ever get the songs “You Stepped Out of Your Body And Into My Heart” or “Human Antenna” out of my head. And today we finished out our round of plays with an afternoon performance of Comedy of Errors and an evening performance of The Royal Family, both of which were just as wonderful as all the rest. In fact, Comedy of Errors is probably the best one of all the plays we’ve seen, and more than deserving of the standing ovation we and the rest of the packed house gave it once they were done. They set the play in Las Vegas, and from the very first moments of the play, when the Count and his men show up dressed as gangsters and the first words out of his mouth were thick with a Chicago accent, to the last scene where one of the twins crouches on a chair and does a Lord of the Rings Golum parody (“My preciousssss”), we couldn’t stop laughing.

I feel as if I hit the ground running on Friday and haven’t stopped since. After all, it was Friday evening I flew up for a far-too-short visit to my little sister and her family in Seattle. I flew back Sunday, giving myself just enough time to unpack, take a short nap, and toss in my laundry before it was off to the church for several hours of rehearsal before the choir concert. As appears to be usual for this thing (this being the third year we’ve done it), we were not even remotely prepared by the end of rehearsal on Thursday night, so the time before the concert was spent doing a full run-through of the entire two hours. By the end of the practice my throat wasn’t the only one starting to hurt, and we still had the actual concert to go, but luckily there was time to inhale dinner between practice and concert, and drink enough hot liquids to wake the throat up again.

It went well. I think this year was the best so far, which I suppose isn’t saying much for only three years of history, but there were no moments that stand out in my head as wince-worthy, and that’s a definite improvement on the previous concerts. They’ll give us CD’s of the concert later and I’ll be able to listen to it and see if I was just not hearing the painful bits, but for now I’m pleased. Heck, I’m just happy I managed to do the two oboe pieces as well as I did, considering I never once had the opportunity to warm up, or even, for that matter, to tune to the flute player with whom I was dueting.

Monday was my one day back in the office, which was mainly spent gathering up all the last minute items we’d need to bring with us for Tuesday. And Tuesday I had to get up at 4am in order to catch a 6:30 flight down to the office in Santa Monica, where we spent the entire day going over checklists and spreadsheets, running reports, crunching data. It was productive, and that made it worth it, but we had scheduled ourselves for the late flight and had no luck getting anything earlier, so didn’t get home until after 10pm. The one benefit was that I had several hours either on the plane or waiting in airports to do nothing but either twiddle my thumbs or knit.

It was marvelous, therefore, to be able to sleep in late this morning, or rather in my case, to be able to go back to bed after the cats woke me up at their usual early hour to be fed instead of having to get ready and go to work. Richard and I have been looking forward to this day for months now – it’s the first real vacation he and I have taken together, and I cannot honestly remember when I last took any sort of vacation like this at all, even before he and I ever met.

We packed our bags and cleaned the house. We had my parents come over so I could walk my dad through the house and show him where everything was since he’ll be taking care of the cats while we’re gone. And then, after some dithering on my part about whether we had everything, we set off for Ashland.

It is not as long a drive as either of us was expecting it to be. I know my perception of distance through northern California has been colored by many trips to Arcata to visit my little sister when she was attending Humboldt State, and while the drive through the redwood forests is lovely, it also takes a good 8 hours to get there. But even with a lengthy stop in Redding, from home to Ashland took just about 5 hours. Not bad at all for our very first road trip.

We had grand plans to make two stops on the way up, but ended up spending far more time at Turtle Bay than expected. It’s a cute little place, especially considering we only saw half of it because with the new bridge over the river still under construction, we were not able to go visit more than half the park. But what we saw was lovely, and enough to make us want to stop by again should we ever be headed in that general direction. For one thing, there is a brand new visitor’s center, surrounded by gorgeous wildflowers and stone turtles. There was a very tiny exhibit of birds of prey, including this very fierce little critter, who was perhaps about the size of a large grapefruit and seemed very excitable, and also a little put out by the fact that we were not the slightest bit intimidated by him. We meandered through the museum, which is even newer than the Visitor’s Center and still seems to be in process of being set up with exhibits, but which was still fun, especially because there was the coolest tree in the middle of the floor, with glass panels all around so that you could see its roots. We had lunch there, including the coolest ever grilled cheese sandwich (it’s shaped like a turtle, in case that wasn’t obvious). Yes, I am still six. And we found the children’s area, where we had fun checking out all the play equipment, and where Richard proved his prowess with a steam shovel.

Driving north on I-5 is pretty darn boring once you are past Sacramento, and it doesn’t get even the slightest bit exciting until you pass Redding and start getting into the mountains. At that point it started getting pretty – all hills and trees and cool air. We drove past Mount Shasta, although there seemed no good place to pull over and take pictures, and then meandered through a valley full of farms and cows and enough rocks to drive someone insane. And then just about the time both of us were about ready to start the ‘Are we there yet?’ whine, we crossed over the Oregon border and the end was in sight.

Originally we had booked a room in a hotel in Medford, since prices were much cheaper and we figured we wouldn’t be spending much time there anyway. But when we pulled up, the condition of the place made us a little nervous, and by the time we had checked into our room and I had discovered that the room was so run down that they had not even bothered to replace the towel rack (the brackets were still on the wall, however), it had become laughable.

I was all set to just suck it up and stay the night, and then try to find a new place the next morning, but Richard was insistent we get out of there right away. It really was a pretty dingy place. So he dug out his guidebook to Ashland, placed a few phone calls, and this is where the beauty of timing really kicked in. If we’d tried to do this next week, over Memorial Day weekend, I’m sure the place would have been packed and we’d never have had a chance of getting a reservation at such short notice. But we chose this week specifically for the non-crowd factor, and before we knew it we had a room reserved at a hotel in Ashland, within walking distance from the theaters, which is where we’ll be spending much of our time anyway.

So we went and ate dinner, then packed up our stuff again, checked out of the hotel, and headed back the way we came down the freeway until we hit Ashland. This new place is much nicer, and next time we decide to do this, if I even think for the briefest of moments about having us stay in Medford instead of right on location, you all have my permission to whack me upside the head until the feeling passes.

There were a lot of things I could be doing this weekend. After all, in only a few more days we are off to Ashland, which means there’s a lot of picking up around the house, and doing laundry, and paying bills, and all the other last minute chores that need to be done to get ready for a long trip. But a few months ago I sent my little sister a link to a chocolate making class, since I know she likes to do that sort of thing. I first suggested she take the class and then send the rest of her family in California the results. But then I started thinking it sounded like a lot of fun, and after a few emails back and forth, I was making plane reservations and she was making class reservation. So I flew up to Seattle this weekend to make these:

Of course I also flew up to spend some time with my little sister, and the world’s cutest niece, and Bil-2, but the impetus for the trip was the chocolate. And really, does anyone really need any more excuses than those? Cute little girl, hanging out with sister and Bil-2, and chocolate!

In case you are wondering, yes, we made every single one of the chocolates you see in that jumbled mess of a box. There were ganaches of every variety – white chocolate, milk, semisweet, and dark. We stirred in cream and learned how to fix a ganache when it breaks (I had no idea a ganache could break in the first place. I am so *not* a gourmet chef, apparently). We zested oranges and limes and boiled them down to make summery citrus truffles (the white lumps you see in that picture). We mixed coffee beans and whole vanilla beans in the cream and boiled them to make an amazing java flavoring for some semisweet truffles (I have never cooked with a whole vanilla bean in my life! I think I was the only one in the class who hadn’t a clue what to do with them). My little sister and I stirred just enough cinnamon oil into dark chocolate to make an amazing flavor combination that had just a hint of heat as an after taste. There were liquors and berries to cook down and stir in. And that was all before lunch!

We were supposed to bring our lunch but we were running late (because someone small was gleefully showing me around the backyard and it’s hard to pull away when someone is asking her Aunt Jennifer to please push her on the swing just one more time), so we raided the vending machines on campus and had a nutritious repast involving baked Lays chips, peanut M&M’s, and chocolate chip cookies. And then it was back to the chocolate making, this time learning how to temper chocolate so it remains smooth and shiny and does not turn all white and streaky.

There is quite a science in the art of making chocolates – a science that revolves around closely monitoring temperatures, and knowing when you should and when you should not stir. And tempering chocolate is where it started to get really messy. It requires a big space to spread it out and smooth it around on a surface until it reaches the right temperature, and then if that wasn’t messy enough, they brought out the molds, and showed us how to make our own chocolate shells to fill with all those lovely ganaches we made that morning. The larger ones we simply created by painting the chocolate into the molds (that would be those purple-wrapped ones you see in the box – they were mint flavored so had to be wrapped so the mint wouldn’t leak into everything else). The smaller rectangle chocolates were made by filling the molds with chocolate, and then dumping them back over the pot, so that only a thick coating remained.

It was amazingly, gloriously messy. There was chocolate everywhere. They showed us how to hand dip all the rolled truffles, using just two fingers. They showed us the right way to dip fruits so we did strawberries and cherries and dried apricots and grapes (I would like to interject an important public announcement here. Grapes and chocolate really should not mix). Then they brought out bowls of chocolate powder, nibs, and sprinkles, and we rolled the truffles to coat them, or used transfer papers to add words to them, or dusted them with just enough gold dust to make them sparkle. And then by the time the class was over they laid out huge trays of all the chocolates we had created, and handed us candy boxes and we all got to take a sampling home with us.

My sister and I have decided that while it looks like something really fun to do maybe once a year for a holiday project, we’re not sure we’re ready to become chocolatiers any time soon. The bar truffles were the easiest things to make, and even those you had to be very careful to get all the proportions correct – the molded truffles required great attention to detail (as well as some fairly expensive equipment). But still, it was well worth the plane flight to come up to take the class. It was the sort of class that is much more fun to take with someone you know, and we had the chance, in between stirring and rolling and dipping and getting ourselves messy, to talk and taste and have a wonderful time.

The rest of the trip was far too short. I flew up Friday night and had to fly back late morning this morning due to this evening’s choir concert, in which I am not only singing but also playing oboe solos for two of the songs and I think the director might just have killed me if I hadn’t come back in time. But there was just enough time last night for dinner and talking and an incredible chocolate cheesecake (because apparently we had simply not had enough chocolate at the class!), and there was just enough time this morning for my little niece to put on her fluffy purple tutu and give me a sneak preview of the dance she will be performing at her very first ballet recital in a few weeks. The sheer cuteness of it was overwhelming. I am not sure how the audience will survive this when they are faced with an entire pack of little 4 and 5 year olds, all in their fluffy tutus, doing vaguely choreographed skips and slides and plies (well, as choreographed as 4 and 5 year olds can get), and singing in their sweet little voices about teaching their dollies to dance.