A Quarter Century!

Pete turned 25 on January 8th. We celebrated with cake, ice cream, and (best of all) friends and family!

Since I was given strict instructions by Pete not to get him any presents for his birthday, I of course got him some--but just a few fun little things.

First, I made 2 journals for me and Pete to each have one and write letters to each other in when I go to Africa this Spring (and since I'm not actually going to Africa anymore, I'm open to creative ideas about how to use these now).

Second, I bought him a BYU Basketball T-shirt that costed a whopping $5.

And finally, I went to Raj's 7/11 store on University and 5th North and bought a HUGE plastic "double gulp" cup.

Yes, there is a story behind this: Once, when Pete was a single man, he was overjoyed to discover in the cupboard of his new apartment a very LARGE plastic 7/11 cup. Because Pete can consume an incredible amount of water, the LARGE 7/11 cup became his regular glass--he drank out of it everyday and it became fondly known as "the man cup." When Pete got married, "the man cup" of course came with him. Sadly, his wife thought it too ugly to sit on the counter by the sink day after day as the focal point of the kitchen. She was overjoyed when, by necessity, it got demoted to catching the leaking water underneath the sink. When the leak was fixed, one look inside the man cup was enough to know it would never be useful for drinking again--no amount of bleach would have been able to kill the who-knows-what that was growing within. And so, after all its years of life and great legacy, it was thrown away--not even recycled. The wife was ecstatic, but Pete felt a great void in his life.

I basically realized how silly of me it was to hate the man cup so much. The new "man cup" is at this very moment sitting on the counter by the sink, in all it's red and white, double-gulp plastic glory. It makes me smile when I accidentally forget to avoid looking at it.



The best present of all was probably a signed copy of Eric's award-winning New Era article "Forgiveness and Football." It doesn't get much better than that :)