What a great day! It’s my Birthday!!

Happy Birthday to me .. Happy Birthday to me…

Someone told me once when I was kinda feeling crappy about my birthday many years ago – that having a birthday is so much better than not having a birthday. And you know what? He was right. So from then on I have no regrets about celebrating my Birthday.

So the celebration started out the night before (Saturday) when Daryl and I got dressed up and headed out for the night. The weather was not nice at all, so we went out for supper someplace close and then just hung out for a few drinks. Nothing too over the top – but hey, at 54 what do you expect?

William was home for the weekend and he was also gone for the night. We were all worried about the weather and they were predicting 6 to 10 inches of snow and blizzard conditions. OK, now this isn’t the best news when your kid is out driving around.  But thank goodness for cell phones and when he sent a text that he was staying the night at someone’s house, well we were all able to get a good night sleep.

Now comes Sunday – my Birthday! I just have to tell you the story about my birthday and growing up when I was a kid. For the longest time I would celebrate my birthday on Feb 2nd. Now no big deal … well other than my Birthday is FEBRUARY 1st! Yea.. For some reason everyone thought my birthday was on Ground Hog’s day and being the 4th kid in our family of 6, well we all just kind of rolled with that date. So one day I needed something for school from the baby book that Mom had in the ‘downstairs closet’ and noticed something odd. We were celebrating my birthday on the wrong day for all those years. I know that some people might get kinda weird about this if this was them – but it’s always a good story to tell and no harm done. The worst of it was a couple of years ago when my one sister called and told me to hurry up and call into the local radio station. Just DO IT she said! My birthday was on the spin wheel or something and you had to be a certain caller and then you won money I guess. Well I didn’t get through and called her back to tell her. She said that it was too bad because February 2nd doesn’t come up that often. Really? 

Alright enough whining about that – Sunday was a great day and after making a path to the barn to check on the animals, William was able to make it back to the farm. He said the roads weren’t that bad yet but didn’t think he should stay long.

Brrrrr….

William couldn’t stay to Skype with Kyle and needed to get ready to pack up to head south for a 3 hour drive back to his apartment. I can’t lie, I was really nervous about him leaving with the terrible weather outside. But before he left, I was summoned out to the Roadhouse for my birthday present. Check it out – Love it!

It is PERFECT!

Its metal and was custom made just for our building.  It’ll go on the outside of the Roadhouse just above the door. Did I say that I really Love it?

Then it was time for William to hit the road. I made him promise that he’d call once he got to his apartment. He had to head out by 1 pm otherwise we were thinking that he’d get snowed in on with all the drifting going on with our road in the afternoon. But he’s a kid and he plowed through the gravel roads with no problem.

So it was quiet for awhile in the house and I wanted to catch up on some cards that I needed to make for Ma. I stood true to the fact that I wanted to make this past year’s Christmas mostly a homemade Christmas,  and for Mom I made her a card box with a bunch of crafted cards in it. I knew that I couldn’t get all the ones that I wanted to done by Christmas, so it’s a gift that keeps on giving throughout the year. Below are some of the cards in her Christmas box so far. I’m going to try to make a few more as the week goes on before I bring back the box. 

Next on the list is to Skype with Kyle. It’s always great to see the kids, either at our house or on the computer. To me it doesn’t matter. He looked good and things are also going well for him. He’s just wrapping up his contract for teaching and will be done within a few months. So with some more Happy Birthday wishes from him, it was time to let him get to his classes. We try to Skype with him on Sunday night (his Monday morning). I think he’s 15 hours ahead of us, so that time seems to work well for both of us.

Humm.. now what to do? Well since it was my birthday and with some chili and marinated baked chicken in the fridge, I figured everyone fend for themselves for supper – I’m making soap. Oh yea.. what a good day this was turning out to be. I tried my orange peppermint soap earlier that day and found out that it really wasn’t so bad. And since I had some time to make a different batch – you guessed it, that’s what I did. So the soap tonight is a Rosemary scented soap with crushed rosemary in it. I wish I still had William’s coffee grinder that he took with him this afternoon. That really would have worked sweet for grinding the rosemary into powder. I’m thinking it’s a little too coarse, but I guess it’ll have to do for now.

The Rosemary soap is set and now needs to be un-molded

This is how it looks when it first comes out of the mold

I cut the soap into bars to dry out for about 5 weeks or so

Now at the end of a long weekend, with the kids both safe in their homes and the yard scraped up so we can get to work tomorrow

Daryl cleaned up the yard when the wind died down tonight

It was time to head to bed. Yup, it really was a Great Day! It was my Birthday!!