Put another candle on my birthday cake...

I have good news for those who are tired of reading about my vacation: there will be one more post about it after this one, then that's it. I promise.

It is not very often I get to celebrate my birthday with my family in Los Angeles. This year, for example, our vacation would have been in June...



and we would have celebrated her 18th birthday, except those plans got changed. So it worked out that we celebrated mine instead.

I sort of helped my dad put together my birthday cake, but he was in charge. Only it was more like a birthday dessert than a proper cake.



We thawed some leftover yellow cake and angel food cake that was in the freezer (my mother trained me well), and I cut that into small cubes. My dad made cooked chocolate pudding (not the instant variety) and let it cool.



Then he made a layer of cake, pudding, and whipped topping, and then another layer of cake, pudding, and whipped topping.



I decided I wanted some walnuts, and chopped M & Ms, and cherries on the top. So I did that.

And he put it in the refrigerator...


and we waited until Andrew, my younger brother, and Donna, his wife arrived (that's a good picture of her nose there on the left).



My brother does a mean barbeque, and she does a wonderful spinach dip. And then everybody else showed up with their contributions to the meal. And we ate, and it was good.

And then it came time for the birthday cake. And it was like turning back the clock, oh 50 years or so.

I'm guessing that just about every child who grew up in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in the 1950s and early 1960s, and who had a television, knew about Sheriff John's Lunch Brigade.

Every day as part of his program, Sheriff John read off the names of those who had birthdays and sang a simple happy birthday song.

"Put another candle on my birthday cake, my birthday, my birthday cake... I'm another year old today..."

If you listen to the first couple of minutes of this interview, Sheriff John sings the song...



And after dinner, they put another candle on my birthday cake



..and brought it in for me to blow it out and they sang that song to me too.



And now I am almost 60 years old. Where did the time go? Who knows? Time just keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the future...