Yesterday was Kate’s birthday. I made her pancakes and fresh-squeezed OJ for breakfast, and bought her a KitchenAid mixer (which I am assured is the only acceptable kitchen appliance to give as a gift to a significant other). She’s been faunching after one for years… I just hope we can find a good place to store it.

In the evening we had a small party, attended by people from all our different communities of friends (writers, fans, square dancers, and, um, Sam and Rory, who are friends via fan Kate Schaefer but are not members of any of the above). We ate pecan pie from the recipe Mary Robinette Kowal had used in Chattanooga, which was tres yum, and played games including jelly-bean relay, charades, and a variant of “telephone” or “exquisite corpse” in which players alternately wrote phrases and drew pictures based on the previous picture/phrase without seeing any of the ones before that. The one that made birthday pie come out of Kate’s nose is shown below (click to embiggen, and again to embiggen again).

The text, in case you can’t read it, goes as follows:

1. Kate is glad to have a birthday party
2. Robespierre celebrates the guillotining of a Conehead
3. Bastille day for coneheads
4. Some monks assault the castle; others juggle; some lose their heads