Countdown to flight back home: five days
Daisy is here. Right now, she is still asleep, as it's 5:23 AM. I myself awakened around four, with heartburn/acid-reflux-like troubles (more than likely brought on by our rather unconventional Christmas dinner; it appears that Tofurky does not like me very much).
Today will be our Christmas, once she awakens in several hours. I wrapped her gifts last weekend, as you know, and when she arrived on Friday she had the backseat of her car filled to the brim with gifts for me -- I wish I were making that up. Two of them were birthday gifts, and the remaining seven were Christmas gifts of all shapes and sizes -- two of which, apparently, were from her mother, who sent my gifts down early.
She wanted me to open my birthday gifts Friday night before I went to bed, so I did -- and I was not disappointed. I mentioned in my last post here that she had ordered gifts from Kohl's -- yes, the department store -- which were my birthday gifts. She ordered them from there because, as she told me, "those things I ordered go together." Okay. I was mystified at what she could've gotten me from Kohl's that she couldn't have gotten cheaper from Amazon, but okay. They were two big packages -- one very heavy and smaller than the other, and one large and light. I was stumped.
The large, light one was a really nice memory foam pillow, like the one she uses. I laughed, not only because I love it, but because she has a good memory herself -- when she comes down here, she brings her own memory foam pillow because my pillows aren't the same/are too soft or hard for her. I told her a long time ago, months ago, that I secretly hoped she forgot to take her pillow home with her after one of her visits because it was so squishy and comfortable. She remembered this and got me my own.
The smaller, heavier one was, and I'm not kidding, a king-size, thick fleece electric blanket for my bed. No wonder she had to get it from Kohl's -- I've done searches on electric blankets on Amazon. They're not cheap, folks, especially in king-size. This means she probably got a really good deal on it on the Kohl's website. That's a really high-end purchase. I was really impressed and very happy -- I've been wanting an electric blanket for years. It gets really cold downstairs in the bedroom in mid-winter, no matter how much I run the furnace. I have an old, quite drafty house.
Now, mind you, the two of those birthday gifts probably cost more than the entirety of the Christmas gifts I got for her and her parents combined, and possibly more than the cost of the gifts for my own parents thrown in there. I ever-so-slightly began to feel a bit like I hadn't done enough for her. And that's just the birthday gifts -- I already know what my big Christmas present is from her (I sort of, through a few different ways, helped her pick it out), and I know that one gift cost more than everything else I've gotten for everyone this holiday season. Yep. It's that big. It's also sitting on my bedroom floor about eight feet from me, wrapped up. I won't unwrap it until later this morning. Again, I'm also not going to reveal what it is until everything is done, though some of my and our mutual friends already know what it is as well.
As an aside, of the seven gifts remaining, one of them I already opened because she wanted me to -- four different kinds of vegan beef jerky. I've already eaten them all. I also know about the big one, and she told me one of the smaller ones yesterday while we were out shopping (which I'll get to, soon) as I purchased something similar. That leaves five gifts -- three from Daisy and two from her mother -- that I have absolutely no clue what they could be. This is good. I like to be surprised.
Of course, once I moved them into my room, my cat Sadie immediately thought they were all for her, and positioned herself amongst them in the sun:
I later emailed this picture to my parents, and posted it on Facebook and Twitter as well. The presents in front of Sadie are from Daisy, and the ones on the left are from her mother.
Daisy also baked me a vegan mocha tiramisu birthday cake, and brought it with her on a heavy glass cake platter. We put thirty candles in it -- almost setting ourselves on fire, because thirty candles is a lot of heat/flame, and she took pictures of it and me in front of it with the candles lit with a hurry-up-and-take-the-picture expression on my face because the candles were rapidly melting and were running down onto the cake. As for the cake itself, we haven't tried it yet -- that's going to be our breakfast this morning. We intended to eat part of it last night as dessert after our Christmas dinner (again, which I will get to) but we didn't -- we went to bed early. We'd had a long day.
That long day entailed getting up, bumming around the house for a while, and then around 1PM leaving Newton for Hutchinson. Hutchinson is 30 miles west of here -- it's a straight line west, actually, and the city in which the Kansas State Fair is held. It also has a decent shopping district, including a somewhat decent mall and a large Target store, two things which Newton lacks. Wichita has two nice malls and a few different Targets, but it's not worth the hassle fighting traffic and trying to find them (because I don't know where the malls are) when it's easier just to go the back roads to Hutchinson and get roughly the same shopping experience.
The trip was fun, but was largely unsuccessful. We took Daisy's car (it's better on gas mileage, and I paid her for the extra gas anyhow), and she was able to find a few gifts for family members and a few cheap clothing items for herself, but I didn't get anything at the mall itself, which was disappointing -- usually I can find some nice clothes and/or other items at JCPenney or Sears, but this time around even their clearance shirts and pants were $20 or more, which is mostly ridiculous. I was hoping to get Daisy something else, something sweet that she could pick out, but she told me she didn't want or need me to get her anything (which she always tells me, and especially around this time of year I've learned that I will now mostly ignore that). The only things I bought were at Target, and they were two t-shirts, some soda, and green beans/cranberry sauce for our Christmas dinner. And we didn't even end up eating the cranberry sauce. Daisy's feet were killing her from the mall-walking by the time we were done in Target, so we just came home without doing anything else or going anywhere else, and I was fine with that. I didn't want her to be in pain, and it was getting late anyhow. We didn't get back home until after 7, and immediately started cooking dinner.
Daisy had brought down the Tofurky name-brand tofurkey, which I'd never seen before. It comes in a little box, wrapped in a tight plastic wrapper similar to what you'd see a ham wrapped in. The "roast" itself was about 6 inches wide by 8 inches long, and was stuffed with rice and bread stuffing (which, we later agreed, was pretty awful). Even though it wasn't real meat -- mostly tofu, vital wheat gluten, salt and other seasonings, basically seitan -- it still took 75 minutes to cook in the oven at 350. We made mashed potatoes and I heated up the green beans, and had ourselves a wonderful little Christmas dinner while watching Community.
As for the Tofurky itself? Eh, it wasn't bad. Very salty, but turkey-like enough. It would be great on sandwiches, we decided. I ate one thick slice of it, got rid of the offending stuffing, and wrapped the rest of it up for sandwiches later this week. The problems came later, in digesting it. At least for me, anyway -- Daisy was/is fine.
I've mentioned before that I'm not entirely used to vegan food. I eat it quite a bit, especially when Daisy is here, but overall it doesn't always necessarily agree with me. Daisy brought down a vegan pizza from a place in Omaha she loves, for example, and that was our dinner on Friday night. It was wonderful, it was fine, and I loved it -- with no digestive side effects. However, most of the time, as my body isn't as attuned to eating vegan as Daisy's is, it doesn't react well to large amounts of tofu or alternative proteins or whatever else is in most of the foods we cook together. This isn't her fault, of course -- my body's used to what I feed it normally, so when it gets something drastically different, it's a shock to the system. So to speak, anyway. Hence I woke up at about 4AM with bad acid reflux and heartburn, bloated, and feeling miserable. I don't get heartburn often -- it's maybe a once-a-year occasion at best -- but it was really bothering me when I woke up. I had no choice but to get up and take something for it, telling Daisy (when she briefly awakened) that I was getting up, to go back to sleep because I had to shower and run the dishwasher anyhow. This is also true, but I wanted the girl to get a decent night's sleep as well without worrying about me. I'm okay now, and plan to go cook waffles for us in about two hours or so. A breakfast of homemade waffles and birthday cake before we open our Christmas presents sounds delightful, right?
So that was our day yesterday. I will update again soon, more than likely after Daisy goes home tomorrow, about everything we got each other as I plan and pack/re-pack for my trip home to West Virginia next weekend.
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