Birthday Cake

Friday November 12th 2009 10:45am

Yesterday Freddy picked me up a little bit early because he had promised to give Marisela and Luis Felipe a ride to work. Traffic was crazy, and as usual we found ourselves waiting on Marisela, so we didn´t get to work until after 9:00.

When we finally did get to work, Marisela, Luis Felipe, and Freddy turned right around and drove out to Talanga for a conference. The office was fairly empty as Nancy was also at the conference and Elmer and Alfreddy were setting up an AIDS awareness workshop.

After lunch we had our second English class and we reviewed the ABC´s, and numbers and started on some basic phrases (Thanks Janis! More suggestions are welcomed!). They were very intruiged by a lot of the literal translations, especially "What´s up?"

Patty came up to talk with me for a while after class and told me that the next day was Betza´s birthday (today). Patty wanted to bake her a cake, and I chipped in a little bit of dinero for the treat, although I would by lying if I said that it was all for Betza. I do enjoy eating cake. We took a taxi home, due to the lack of a functioning car that I could drive, and I got back to my apartment by 5:00.

Around 5:30, Patty called, and told me that she didn´t have the ingredients for a cake and asked if I wouldn´t mind running to the store and making a cake from a box mix. For those of you who don´t know, my first real job was working at Coldstone Creamery, and as a part of that job, I made ice cream cakes. Making the cake was easy. Decorating the cake was hard. I´m not exactly an artist, and my job at Coldstone was always to go find one of the girls to do the writing on the cake after I had finished making it.

The cake I made for Betza was no different. I can follow instructions on a box just fine. I can even put on the generic chocolate icing. But when it comes to words, flowers, or any sort of a design that may be expected to make an appearance on the cake, my cake making skills come to an abrupt halt.

Despite knowing this fact, and despite not having worked at Coldstone for the past five years of my life, I carried on through the decorating part, and managed to squeeze out some white frosting letters that can easily be read through squinted eyes and an intepreter (me) helping.

When I finished the cake, it was late, and I tried to read a little, but was soon fast asleep.