Remember my birthday surprises, and how you thought there was no way I could possibly still be talking about them in MAY, considering my birthday was in March?

You were wrong.

I still had one surprise left to redeem. That surprise was the Paper Surprise, and because the Paper Surprise took a while to prepare, it didn’t arrive until this morning.

LOOK! A BOOK!

But not just any old book, because OMG, it’s a book about ME!

Well, OK, a book about me and Terry. And our wedding. Which, no, we never actually bothered to get any photos printed from, until now, so this was a particularly lovely surprise for me. Each page has photos from the wedding, and lots of them also have little quotes chosen by Terry:

We had a lot of Beatles songs at our wedding. A LOT of Beatles songs.

I tried to take more photos, but they came out blurry, and also this kept happening:

I don’t actually make him pose like that, by the way. He just sees me with a camera and is all, “Oh, hai! I can has piktur taken?”

And that conludes the “Surprise” section of this blog. I think Terry deserves a round of applause for his efforts, don’t you? People, I give you… TERRY!

(Note: I am not actually giving you Terry, OK? He is mine.)

After all of the complaining that went down in the comments section of my post about Terry’s results, I figured it was time to lighten the atmosphere a little with one of our regularly scheduled “surprise” posts. Sadly, there are only a couple of these left to go, but one day last week (or was it the week before? Seriously, they’ve all started to blend into one another…) I happened to look out of the office window to see this:

Yes, Terry had “engraved” our lawn. It was very cunning of him, and it has actually made us wonder if it would be possible to kill ALL the grass in our garden in this way? I mean, we’ve killed almost everything else in the garden (yes, that is a dead plant you can see in the pot behind the “engraving”), why not the grass? You think I’m joking, but that just means you haven’t read all of my entries about how much I hate and detest gardening yet. The other option is to simply do nothing and allow the garden to return to the wild. I’m considering that one, too.

As well as jelly sweets, one of my other favourite food groups is the Crispy Cake: you know, just like your mother used to make?

And, lo! The Crispy Surprise turned out to be:

Three crispy cakes, all covered in chocolate and made with Terry’s own fair hands!

Mmmm, ambassador, with these crispy treats you’re really spoiling us!

On Sunday night Terry offered to run me a bath. Well, of course I agreed, but little did I know that Terry was about to spring the WAX SURPRISE – duh duh DUH!

Because I am stupid, it took me a few minutes (and, OK, then a few more…) to work out that the “wax” of the name came from the candles he had lit in the bathroom.  But really, who cares about candles when there’s a big ol’ gift-wrapped box sitting right in front of them?

Underneath the wrapping, Lush’s ‘You’re a Star’ gift box:

So-called because it contains products used by the “stars”, apparently. And now by me too, yipee!

Inside the bath, though, an even more exciting surprise awaited:

DUCKS!  Because, seriously, who doesn’t love ducks?

Well, would you look at that: looks like I DIDN’T find anything other than my birthday surprises to write about this week after all! Let’s just pretend I did, OK? I won’t tell if you don’t…

Anyway, as I mentioned last week, I was a little apprehensive about what “Rubin’s Surprise” was going to turn out to be because… well, he likes to pee recently. Mostly in places he shouldn’t, and by “places he shouldn’t” I mean “on the radiator in the office”.  When I turned around from my busy, important work today, though, and saw this:

I relaxed a little. I mean, I don’t think even Rubin would gift-wrap pee, although you never really know with him. As you can see, though, he’d gone to a not inconsiderable amount of effort here:

So I decided to risk unwrapping it, and here’s what I found:

Aww, books about doggies! He must have had to save up his pocket money for ages to buy those! And now I need to go and finish my work so I can read them…

As many of you have long since realised, I am secretly only eight years old. So when I woke up on Saturday morning and found this sitting on my desk waiting for me, naturally I shrieked like a child:

And then, when I opened it up and discovered that the big pink box contained some of my Most Favourite Things Ever – jelly sweets – I shrieked even more. I told you I was only eight…

OMG, hamburgers!

OMG, fangs!

OMG brains! (The brains were the best ones, by the way.  Love them brains.)

OMG squirting skulls!

OMG teeth!

I would say more about this, but obviously I’ve been on a sugar high since Saturday morning*, and I need to go and chase Rubin round the garden or something to work it off. But jelly sweets! Yay!

(P.S. Don’t worry, I have been eating them sparingly. Or as sparingly as I can, anyway. Am sensible like that. Well, sometimes…)

So, the Calcium Surprise turned out to be, not a carton of milk, but grilled haloumi cheese, cut into hearts and served stacked up, with a handful of grapes:

Calcium Surprise

Best. Thing. Ever.

I hate Fridays. Hate them. I know all the cool kids hate Mondays, but I reserve my ire for Friday, which is The Day From Hell for me, because, for reasons too complicated and boring to go into here, that’s the day I have to do more work than I do in the rest of the week put together. (Not for much longer, though, of which more later. </cryptic> )

Every Friday, then, I work until my arms ache and my fingers are almost numb.  I’m not generally finished until late at night, and when I finally fall into bed, exhausted, it is the happiest moment of my week, purely because it’s the moment at which I’m furthest away from next Friday.

This Friday was an especially bad ‘un, which meant the Surprise Red was particularly welcome:

A bottle of Amarone, aka “Surprise Red”.

No, I didn’t drink it all.  I did very much enjoy what I did have, though:

cheers!

Oh, and I think someone else enjoyed it, too:

TED! I don’t know. His behaviour’s been really erratic lately. I think he may be having a mid life crisis or something…

I called in the “Sparkle Surprise“…

…. and discovered that Terry now has to be responsible for all house-cleaning duties (including ironing, yay!) for the next week.  So my house will… sparkle.  Do you see what he did there?

Of course, what Terry doesn’t know is that I have cunningly hidden the “Sparkle Surprise” card, so I can re-use it over and over again. Double yay!

It was my birthday on Tuesday. I didn’t mention it at the time because, well, I hate birthdays.  And because I was sulking and feeling hard-done-by on account of the fact that, wah, I just got older!

But it was my birthday, and in the evening, Terry took me here:

(It’s a vegetarian restaurant in Edinburgh. We’re not vegetarians, but God, the food is delicious…)

I wore this:

And over dinner, Terry gave me these:

They are “surprises” and there are 12 of them, which I can redeem anytime I want (although some of them require a certain amount of notice, or can only be redeemed on weekends, etc.) They have names like “Sparkle Surprise” and “Surprise Red”, and there’s even a “Rubin’s Surprise, which makes me a little bit nervous, because most of the “surprises” Rubin’s been leaving me lately could be described using the words “pee” and “radiator”.

(The names are cryptic, apparently.  I don’t think the “Calcium Surprise” is a carton of milk, for instance, but you never know…)

With this one act, Terry has earned Brownie points that will last at least until the vouchers run out. And birthdays = not so bad, really.

(Oh, and I also got this gorgeous handmade bookmark from Nina:

Isn’t that the prettiest thing? And the book’s not bad either, by the way. Ahem.)