Whitney's birthday was yesterday, and we've already had an unusually exhausting weekend that was spent mostly out in Boston, visiting the aquarium and then eating most of its inhabitants at a seafood restaurant in Cambridge. Among other things, I gave her a miniature Professor Layton to keep her company if I go away again, and all of our parents got together with me to contribute to an iPad - last Wednesday, I received the most disappointing delivery ever when a courier came to the door with a two inch box that contained a stand for it, as it had been shipped ahead of the main article.

The race for most appalling e-card this year was as hotly contested as ever, with my parents offering up this truly hideous video of computer-generated chipmunks badly synchronized to a grating slightly sped up rendition of the birthday song. However, her grandmother probably beat this with the simple device of sending her exactly the same one that she got last time, a make-up themed monstrosity that declares something like "No amount of make-up can improve a girl like you", with the probably unintentional lyrical subtext of "Because it would be like putting it on a steam boiler". To top things off, it was through a site that appears to be something that you can sign up for and it'll just automatically send emails to people on their birthdays for you. When you go there, there's even a pre-filled out form that you can just click on to instantly send a generic thank you note.

My own effort was something that called out to me from a shelf in the supermarket - it first caught my eye because of the rabbit, and the implication that the second line could be "Because I'd probably lose a finger if I tried"...





And it turned out that he was in fact the perviest little rabbit ever.

Of course I still got it.