Happy birthday, lil Splotch!

This is a day late because I was trying to think of what to say about Kate that would encapsulate her fabulousness, but I have plainly failed miserably so I’m just going to settle for a few comments at random. What really encapsulates her is this story, and I’ve already said that, so anything afterwards is just going to be much less Kate-capturing. But here we go. Lil Kate’s birthday post.

Kate is nice because she likes to watch movies. And Robyn likes to watch movies. This pretty much forms the basis of their relationship. They watch movies together like anything. The other thing that forms the basis of their relationship is their mutual very small bladder size. When I watch movies with them, about every twenty minutes one of them says, “Um, can we pause it for a sec?” (In my household we do not let people leave the room while movies are playing and not pause the movie. That just Isn’t Done. Even if they say they’ve seen it ten thousand times and they hate this part and that’s why they’re pretending they need to go get some water, we pause the movie. Because every golden moment counts.) So we pause the movie, and the one that didn’t ask for it to be paused says, “Oh good! Me too!” and off they both dash to the bathrooms to answer the call of nature. It is just lucky for them that we have two bathrooms in my house because otherwise wouldn’t that just be too bad for them.

But I forgive her for this bladder issue for the following reasons:

This one time a few years ago when my sister and I were staying at the house alone for a week and everything went totally wrong and the dog got sick and we had no food and no money and it was very stressful, we finally decided that damn it we were going to make some delicious dessert for ourselves, so we started assembling ingredients, and we were out of milk. All out. Of milk. We had no milk. I believe both of us burst into tears, and then we rang up lil Kate and asked if we could borrow some milk and she said of course. So we drove over there and she gave us some milk and additionally gave us some movies that she said would help us through our time of struggle, and indeed the merry hijinks of the metal-controlling Ian McKellan and sexy clawed Hugh Jackman saved us from falling into the depths of despair and never re-emerging.

She totally hooked us up with Cold Comfort Farm. When Seth is all being his farmy Seth Starkadder self and Judith is wailing and they play the Tara theme — ah, we knew we were in the presence of cinematic genius. And that is only one of the genius flims she has introduced us to; there are many others, including (hooray!) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Angels in America.

She is very cute in this one picture I have of her sitting upon the bed in her cute pajamas reading Barbara Cartland’s romance masterpiece Love is Contraband. And yes! she…likes Barbara…Cartland. It is…sad, but…true.

(Barbara Cartland, in case you’re interested, is deeply interested in vitamin therapy. Deeply. It says so in all her About the Authors. And she helps gypsies and old people, and one year she published 26 books. That’s one every two weeks. Just to give those of you who don’t know Barbara Cartland a feel for the quality of her novels.)

A few years ago she did a science fair project on dark chocolate and its effect on blood pressure and I got to be part of it and she gave me all this chocolate for free! And I just had to eat it! Every day I HAD to eat some chocolate! IT WAS SO GREAT. And that is how I know that I love dark dark dark Lindt chocolate with all of my soul.

She once said that Anne of Green Gables could kiss her ass.

So anyway, lil Kate, happy belated birthday! I hope you had a splendid splendid birthday! And I even have some birthday advice for you, since I am such a wisdom figure in your life: If you ever meet Matt Damon, don’t do that. I know it’s tempting but you’ll have to resist.