Birthday

Today is my 31st birthday. Man, that sounds much older than 30. It's been a good haul for me today. D ordered me a gift thinking it was being shipped from SF and would get here on time with regular ground shipping; unfortunately, it is being shipped from Wisconsin and the tracking showed it wouldn't arrive on time. So, despite the fact I told him that was just fine (and it really was just fine with me) he went out and bought me an additional gift. Woohoo! I now own a new PowerShot SD 600 Digital Elph camera - 6 mega pixels. We actually found the battery to the old digital that I was using to take many of my blog pictures, but I commented offhand to D (and I wasn't even hinting) that I was going to have a hard time going back to that one after using his camera and its much higher resolution. The resolution on this one isn't quite as good as his, but it's a much smaller camera and 6 mega pixels is pretty good. My other gift that should arrive in a few days is the Nature Mill's Indoor Trash Composter that I mentioned about a month or so ago. I'm hoping that once we have this running and have mastered using it, I will be able to reduce the size of our garbage pickup each week.

From both D's dad and my dad, I got a gift certificate and money to be used for facials at my spa. Perfect!

From Jeremy, I got a beautiful orchid that I'm going to do my best to keep alive! I'll post a picture of that in a post later this week.

Mom, of course, got me the AeroGarden which is fast producing our salad greens. Quite fascinating to watch it grow.

Speaking of Mom, we just dropped her off at the airport. It was a great visit and I'm so happy she agreed to fly out here for Christmas - thanks, Mom! Here we are before we left for the airport.



Dinner last night was very good. We actually had a beef rib roast that we'd received as a gift last year which had been in our freezer all year. We decided to use that for Christmas dinner since it was a very good quality piece of meat and figured the quality would make up for the longer-than-usual time in the freezer. It really did. It was absolutely delicious. D did the roast and the roasted vegetables (two kinds of potatoes, parsnips, onions, and butternut squash); Mom did the carrots; I did the brussel sprouts (with garlic, breadcrumbs, and lemon). It was absolutely delicious - D did a terrific job with the meat and vegetables. I didn't take a picture, but you all will have to take my word for it.

Eddie has gone back to normal immediately after Mom's departure. From the moment she arrived to the moment she left, he has been very needy. He would follow me or D around constantly. He would crawl under my desk while I was typing, or would follow me around the kitchen. It was very weird. It's not like he's afraid of my mom (for those of you who don't know her, it is completely ridiculous to think that dogs wouldn't like my mom, they LOVE her, she loves them) - he would go up to her and ask for snuggles. D's theory is that he thought that we were replacing him with my mom. Who knows. However, the difference was immediate when we returned home after dropping Mom at the airport: he's not following either one of us around now. He's such a sensitive dog.



I'm off to walk the dogs. They don't seem to remember that it's my birthday and I should get the day off from walking them! Silly dogs. Here's a picture Mom took on yesterday's dog walk. Turtle is looking pretty chunky, but told me to tell everyone the camera adds 10 lbs! Ditto from me (as I sit here with my pants unbuttoned after days of indulging myself way too much).



Edit: I didn't have my camera on high resolution when we took the photos with me and my mom, so it's not too impressive when you click on them to make them bigger. Here's a shot of Turtle (after cropping) with the higher resolution: