FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE

136 – Saturday, May 16, 2009

Today, Donna hosted a family birthday celebration for her daughter, Chrissy. All were there to wish her well for the coming year and rejoice with her in years gone by. In an ICQ chat earlier in the week, Donna and Cynthia conversed regarding the fare for the gathering, especially, what we could bring. Our contribution was to be an ice cream cake, Cynthia understood Donna to say, and that Chrissy’s favorite is vanilla vanilla from Publix. I volunteered to make the run early in the day – I never object to grocery runs, for I am pretty good at staying on the list, reducing the shopping experience to more of a ‘mission’ than an aisle-by-aisle perusal of the entire store. I was looking for the said item in lavender trimmings, Chrissy’s color of choice, but I found only one vanilla vanilla, and it certainly was not decorated in lavender. I left the supermarket frustrated because I could not find the ‘just right’ ice cream cake and returned home where I compelled Cinnie to join me and enter the quest. In the subsequent two hours we exhausted all the possibilities – two other Publix locations, a Sweetbay, and even a desperate final trip to the ice cream gurus, Baskin Robbins, where they had never even heard of a vanilla vanilla ice cream cake, but they could make one with a minimum of forty-eight hours notice. In exasperation, and with our destination appointment growing near, we retraced our steps back to the very first Publix and there retrieved the first cake I had discovered, vanilla ice cream and vanilla cake (the cake was actually a yellow cake, but they called it ‘vanilla’). Upon arrival, I asked Donna where to stow the ice cream cake until serving. It was then I discovered that they were not expecting an ice cream cake, rather a regular sheet cake – white cake with vanilla frosting – Rats, I could have picked that little number up on my very first pass! This is a perfect illustration of some more of that “Larrison Luck” that you have come to know – that which takes anything that should be a rather simple egg and beating it endlessly until it becomes a meringue. There was an upside, however – the ice cream cake turned out to be a discovery of one of the best tasting ice cream cakes I have ever enjoyed. Sometimes, you see, less than perfect situations can yield better than expected results – you just have to always focus on the positive!

This blog is posted on: http://rlarrison.blogspot.com/ and http://myspace.com/rlarrison