Fowler Follies

When I came back to my desk from lunch today, I had a lovely surprise waiting for me – flowers!  For me!  On MY desk! 

I’ve never had flowers at work before, unless of course I brought them myself.  I asked Calvin if he knew who had left them there  since he sits in the cubicle right next to me.  He said, “No, but everyone else has been coming by and asking me the same thing!”  I had to laugh knowing that I was suddenly the talk of the Quadigon.  (The Quadigon is what we call our little cube farm.  It’s a square addition to the main building and we all joke that we aren’t good enough to work in the Pentagon so they stuck us in a Quadigon.)  Anyway, I opened up the little envelope to read the note and found that the flowers were from my co-worker Steve.   Along with the flowers, he had included a very sweet note. 

Needless to say, this is part of the reason why I enjoy my job.  I have the BEST co-workers ever!! 

Yesterday Rob & I received a wedding gift from Nancy & Sue.  Tucked in the mailing box alongside our fantastic wedding gift was another very pleasant surprise – a box of Godiva chocolates!  It was beautifully wrapped with white flowers tied to the top and just the site of it made one want to start drooling.  I became incredibly excited because I knew this was going to be a whole new experience for me.  You see, I was a Godiva Virgin.  (*NOTE: Important word here is “was” because you know we just HAD to eat some of the chocolate that night!!*)  Rob could not believe that I had never had Godiva before and was very excited for me to try it.  We shared 3 pieces and not one of them was anything less than wonderful.  So thank you to Nancy & Sue, for providing me with my first Godiva experience.  And for anyone who has not yet tried Godiva, I highly recommend it.

While we were on the Labor Day raft-up with LCYC, Cheryl and I were talking about the wedding and discussing last minute details that needed to be finished up.  During the discussion, she asked if I had my “Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue”.  I told her my “new” was my dress, veil, shoes, etc., my old was my grandmother’s ring, my blue was also my grandmother’s ring because it has two blue trillion cut sapphires in it, and my something borrowed was… Hmm… It was at that point that I realized that I didn’t have ANYTHING borrowed.  And aside from that, I didn’t even know what I could borrow to use in the wedding.  I still have not come up with any ideas and am going to have to start asking people what they have that I could possibly borrow!  Hopefully I can find something better than Sean’s Redskins hat!!

Let me just start this post by giving a little background information.  I love Sangria.  One afternoon, Rob decided that he would follow a Sangria recipe in a bar book that Nicole had lent us to make me a pitcher of yummy Sangria.  He got all the ingredients together and began slicing, mixing, etc.  Eventually, he came to a line that instructed him to “to muddle the fruit with the sugar mixture”.  I was on the phone with my Mom at the time and we all got a kick out of the word muddle.  Since we didn’t have a muddler and hadn’t even heard of one until that moment, Rob muddled the fruit using a wooden spoon.  It wasn’t technically muddling since there was no muddler but it got the job done. 

So anyway, one evening, Rob & I came home from work to find a package on our doorstep.  It was white with “Crate & Barrel” written around the outside edge in bold black lettering.  Of course, I had a complete girl moment and got all excited because Crate & Barrel is one of my favorite stores!  We were surprised at how light the box was and brought it inside to open it up.  Inside was a beautifully wrapped gift box with a little card.  The card read, “Now you can muddle in style!  Love, Mom & Dad”.  We opened the box and found LOTS of paper.  Eventually, we came upon a muddler.  We both had to laugh because we weren’t quite sure what to expect a muddler to look like… and the size of the box made us suspect it was going to be rather large!!  Not so!  See for yourself!

Thank goodness the muddler was not large enough to fill up the box!  And thank goodness we now have a muddler so we can make more Sangria and muddle in style!!  Now all we need is some more wine…