Setting the bar

Last year, when we were married but three weeks, Andrew went all out to celebrate my birthday. We splurged for dinner at a really nice restaurant, and he bought me a gift I never would have bought myself. (A small chest freezer, where we can store all the tomato sauce I'm always making.) I told him at the time that he was setting the bar awfully high: I'd start expecting a perfect birthday every year.

Well, this year he lowered the bar so far that a quiet dinner at home next year will be celebration enough. To be fair, it wasn't his fault. The day started out great, when Andrew presented me with this cake, which he had sneakily baked while I was away in Philadelphia and then hidden in his closet of tools:
I was especially impressed because he had never before baked a cake, and it came out perfect.

Our plan was to spend the day at the beach. It's about a three hour drive to the beach we love best, but we were going to make a day of it. There's one point in the trip where traffic regularly slows to a crawl - the Bay Bridge. This bridge spans the Chesapeake Bay, and getting to the ocean without crossing it would add several hours to our trip. We were sailing along, when right before we drove on to the bridge, the traffic stopped. There had been an accident, and the whole span was shut down. We ended up eating our picnic in the car, while we waited the hour and a half it took them to clear it.

By then it was getting late, so we decided to skip the beach. We turned around and came home, where Andrew gave me my present. I had been lobbying for a new bathrobe, and that's what I got. Unfortunately, the shiny, hooded, knee-length robe made me look like a boxer. (Something like this, but, you know, more female and Caucasian.) We're sending it back.

In other news (but with a related theme, trust me), I need to learn to set the bar lower when dealing with the federal government. When we started the paperwork to make sure Andrew could stay in the US as long as he wanted, regardless of employer, I steeled myself for at least two years of paperwork. I mentally removed the $1500 from the bank account that it would cost to make this possible. Even more importantly, I let Andrew do as much of the paperwork as possible. Dealing with situations like this (where you're the supplicant of a monolithic corporation that can request pretty much whatever it wants) just gets me into a tizzy. Now we're seven months into the process and we're hit the first roadblock. Apparently they've sent us an approval - an approval that says "Yes, we've looked at your paperwork, and now you may send us more money and forms." Unfortunately, we didn't receive the notice. And now we'll have to pay $350 more to get a new one.

Andrew reminds me that we can afford this extra fee a lot more than most of the people applying for residency, and he's absolutely right. But I think I'll keep letting him talk to the government officials, so that my blood pressure stays low.