Excuse? My avatar has been digitally crushed under a mounting pile of electronic mail and is unable to extract herself

What happened? what happened to all the writing?
Two things: I just finished writing all but a few pages of a 16 page magazine (I know, HUGE) about lung health -- that project alone has tapped all of my current creative energy, as my mind has been contorting itself over 15 hundred different ways to say BREATHING IN CAR EXHAUST IS BAD FOR YOU - hey! behold version 1501.
In addition (to my lack of inventive segues, see above re: creative tappage), March, and especially the last week and a half, has been the month of guilt induced email sent to my inbox. Subject headings have included "I'm sorry!" and "Shame on me..." These of course will contribute to next week's outbox full of replies entitled "Don't worry, we both suck." (Note to Hallmark: if you guys ever run out of greetings, my email is where it's at). All this influx of mail has resulted in the formation of a list -- as I must list anything that begins to overwhelm me everything -- of people I need to email back. The list has grown to a magnitude which, instead of making me feel less whelmed, makes me want to hide under a rock. SO... you may not hear from me until next week. And when you do, it may be just to receive one of my many many business cards in the mail. Business cards with which they went card-printing crazy last week and now I don't know what to do with them all. Solution: mail them to everyone I know. It's not as involved as email, but it will take a lot of stamps...
At this point I would like to point out to my mother that although I do have this looming pile of emails to dig my way out from under *spectacular grammar!*, she nonetheless does hear from me on a semi-regular basis.
As I have just now been emailed material for my upcoming sleep apnea article, I must leave. Huzzah!

Please position mounted police officer in front of 98 B-line

I seem to be having one of those weeks.
One of those weeks where it seems that complete strangers are suddenly, irrationally, and inexplicably driven to make you feel like crap.
Yesterday a woman nearly demanded I refund her $2.50 for a coffee which she bought and then couldn't take into a big expensive lecture theatre with her. I was clearly responsible because I should have been psychically picking up the fact that she wanted to drink it INSIDE rather than out, during the 20+ minutes she had before the lecture was actually going to start. I could barely restrain myself from asking: "You wouldn't be a Queen's student by any chance, would you?"

This morning, still feeling fragile from my encounter with the COPD lecture attendees (she was the worst, there were more), the bus driver yelled at me while a long line of passengers was left waiting to board. The reason? I neglected to scratch off a particular number on the front of my pass. I didn't realize I had to, AND I've been riding with it like that for TWO WEEKS. TODAY IT WAS A PROBLEM.
Honestly, if one more person takes out their cranky-pants emotional waste dump on me, I'm going to... well I don't know what I'm going to do, but it's going to have something to do with the overflow from their dumps interacting with my dump, the excess and overflow and IT WON'T BE PRETTY.

I have a certain mental image I use in cases like this. I imagine this person having incredibly bad karma in return for treating me like this, and the karma is embodied by a large seagull afflicted with projectile diarrhea. Why a seagull? I don't know. I guess I find the image of the offending party being literally shat on comforting in it's hilarity.

When I mentioned this to TM this morning in an email he suggested that I think about substituting the seagull with a horse.

He is pretty awesome.

Birthweek

This past Wednesday was TM's 24th bday. You all have my permission to email him for the soul purpose of making off-colour over-the-hill jokes.
Since Wednesday is an awkward day to celebrate a birthday, TM quite helpfully suggested that we extend it to a birthweek -- a week which of course included both weekends.
And so two birthday cakes were in order.
Unfortunately our oven sits on an angle...

...and so did the cake.
However, I might point out that presentation aside, this chocolate blackout cake was pretty much fantastic.
Not as fantastic as this though:

If you want to know what it is, just click to see the description.
The recipe for this one can be found here.
We of course altered the recipe in that we used twice the amount of ice cream called for. *Shrug*