So Many Candles . . . So Little Cake

It was Bob Gaither's 30th birthday yesterday. Being a few months away from 30 myself, I still have leeway to make fun of everybody else for turning 30 (and can get away with calling them old.)

So I decided to have a little fun.

My brother Steve, my wife, and I had lunch at Red Robin on Saturday, and then hit a whole mess of new and used bookstores. We were looking not for a specific book, but for a specific type of book . . . it had to be around 2 inches thick or more, and needed a title along the lines of "Coping with aging", or "Dealing with old age". This was a tall order, as evidenced by the long list of stores we visited.

We'll get to the "why" in a moment.

After about four hours of searching, we had no good ideas (except a $20 new book from Book Bin), and were ready to give up, when I realized "hey, maybe it would be easier to make a new book jacket in Photoshop rather than try to find a book with just the title we want." Courtney and Steve agreed that perhaps I should have thought of this hours ago.

We bought the thickest book on the $2 shelf, made a scheduled stop at the liquor store, and returned home.

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, is almost 600 pages long. That got it to the thickness we needed, but the nature of our plan was such that the difficulty of our task increased with every page long our book was.

Because we were cutting a hole into every single page.

Four hours later (Steve had eventually gone home, I fear out of boredom), I finally cut the last hole in the last page, using the side of a Raisin Bran box as a backing so I didn't mar the inside cover. I had some finessing to do with the edges of some cuts, and had accidentally torn out a couple pages here and there, but it was good enough:

That's right . . . we managed to fit the Jim Beam (the reason for our aforementioned liquor store side-trip) into the book.

So now you see why we wanted a book on "dealing" or "coping". It's a gag gift, and one I'm glad to say we had spent only $2 on (minus the cost of the JB, and of the gasoline used for 4 hours of thrift store hunting).

Exhausted, several razor-blades poorer, and unable to bend my wrists all the way (600 pages is a lot of cutting!) I retired to bed. I still had a Sunday School lesson to plan, and Bob's party was at 1:30 the next afternoon. Sunday morning would be busy.