B-Day time again, this time it's the Other White Meat!

Happy Winter Solstice!
Also, Happy Birthday to my darling aged hubby, Great White. He’s like cheese or wine… he improves with age. At least I like to think (or hope) so.

We didn’t do much. Sadly, I didn’t do anything too special for him, as I mentioned, I had tried last week to go buy him a present and a card. I had no luck on either, but managed to find a tiny tiny card in really bad English that I bought for comic purposes and to mark his birthday abroad. I also found cute funny cheesy wrapping paper. That will just have to wait until l find something to wrap.

I went to teach my conversation class and I learned that the winter solstice (called "Yaldah") is an important night. Families try to get together and spend quality time together just laughing and talking and bonding over fruit and nuts and seeds, like pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and other roasted salted stuff. One of the students ran to her apartment and brought back a long black sword-shaped seed so we cracked those and ate the seeds inside and talked. I don't know what they were, but they were delish. On this night, people also try and stay up late, if possible.

So I went back home to my precious family for a double celebration. I had also tried cooking something special for his birthday. My mom makes this awesome baked chicken dish so I made something similar (let’s hope I remembered correctly) except I have no oven so I just cooked it. So it’s cooked baked chicken. I also made green beans and potatoes (a curry type thing, for lack of a better English word), which turned out very well. I also made some khichri (lentil rice?) and raita. A veritable feast. I am pleased to announce that it was all edible.

We had already finished off the cake this morning.
Anyway, AliBob took this picture of our “spread”, excited by my efforts. That’s the tiny card propped up against the bottle.

Then, because there was nothing else to do and only a couple of hours remained before his birthday was over, we took some self photos, to commemorate his birthday:

My sister also called to wish him a happy birthday, which was very cool. The rest of my family was at work, but my parents had tried calling a few days ago to wish him a happy birthday. They ended up emailing. I think some of my cousins also remembered and emailed him, which was a very pleasant surprise.

I was thinking of ode'ing to AliBob, but it would get way too mushy and personal and most likely inappropriate, so let's just leave it at he's the best and I'm the luckiest.