Just human

Just in case my life in the blogosphere seems too good to be true, I thought I would share my last 24 hours. Life seems determined to give me long lived lessons in humility.

Case in point:

Biked 30 minutes to the stable last night...only to find that I had forgotten the trailer keys (they are on my truck key ring so that I never ever forget them). So I cleaned pens and biked another 30 minutes home. (this story is important to the post, as the rest of the story has nothing to do with horses, civil war, history, or anything else I've stretched to make the theme of this blog. It's just about being human).

Now - that could have been a single instance - something to laugh off and maybe call a sympathetic friend or two over. So just to make sure I got the point, Life gave me....the cake incident.

Now, I hardly ever (read - never) share work stories here. It's just not appropriate. However, I couldn't pass this one up.

A week ago I ordered a full sheet cake for a department baby shower party at work. Chocolate/white combo with whipped frosting, custard filling yada yada yada. At 9am I get a hysterical phone call from my "secretary" (she's not, but she jokes about it - in reality she's an employee that does ALL of my ordering, secretary odd-jobs etc.). Seems that someone went into the bakery this morning and walked out with our cake. It's gone and I need that cake by 10am. I get the bakery number, put on my best "no-compromise" face and proceed to very firmly tell them that I will be there to pick up a replacement cake in 1 hour. It was their error and I was not going to hear any excuses. Never mind that 20 minutes later I got a call from someone else who works for my (largish) company - they had gone in to pick up a cake for a different event and ended up with mine. They were going to bakery to pick up their original cake...the bakery does not take returned cakes so technically I could have gotten it from her.... At that point I was NOT calling up the bakery to tell them to stop production, because my new cake was probably already 1/2 done and darn it, they should have been more careful with which cake went where.....don't worry - I paid for this inconsiderate behavior. (BTW - The person that had MY original cake was in a different town, even though we worked for the same company so it wasn't like it was as easy as going down the hall and getting my cake.)

Did you know a full sheet cake is HUGE? I had to put it in the back of my pickup. After careful consideration I stacked some items around it to keep it from sliding around. The top was taped down, but as an extra precaution I put a package of screw drivers (yes, the same ones I used at tevis as tent stakes AND the ones involved in the trailer drama) on top of the lid.

I drove oh so carefully and accelerated onto the freeway at 70mph. I kept seeing something out of the corner of my eye but couldn't catch it.....oh....there went the cake lid. Crap. I pulled over to the side of the freeway (yes this was an emergency) and looked at the cake.

The lid was gone and as it left it had cut a huge swath through the top of the icing. one side of the cake has smooshed into the box. The baby sitting on a cupcake as a decoration had split in two. Darn it!

I drove the couple more miles to the office.

I unloaded the cake from the truck. Proceeded to try and balance a full sheet cake with one hand and close my tail gate. Crap! There goes the other side of the cake into the box.

As I climbed the stairs I contemplated the fact I was going to try and attempt to open a 2 sets of double doors with this thing......and then slipped.

My boot missed a step. The cake went "ploop" onto the ground at the top of the stairs as I lurched to catch myself.

Crap.

The impact of it hitting the ground had caused all the side and decorative icing around the top to fall down the sides of the cake.

I got through the doors, mashing yet another side of the cake.

and....delivered the cake to the happy mother to be. She said she didn't even notice the damage. Uh huh.....

I just told people I fell, leaving out the lid flying off in the truck bed etc. Why complicate things?

Off to get lots and lots and lots of riding in this weekend.