Birthday Cake

Thank you all for the wonderful birthday wishes.  I couldn't have asked for a better birthday.  It may not sound very exciting, but it was a perfect day.  We had the formal celebration last week because Mike knew he'd be out of town on my birthday and Zack was working.  It was just Sarah and I at home.  

I got home from work in the wee hours of Monday to discover that Sarah had cleaned the house, top to bottom.  Not only was everything sparkly clean, but there was dinner waiting for me.  I went to bed and woke up later in the afternoon to enjoy coffee and cake out on the deck.

Lemon/blueberry cake

Oops!  I didn't even think to take a photo of the cake until we'd eaten most of it.

I never thought anything could replace my grandmother's chocolate mocha cake as my all-time favorite but Sarah's lemon/blueberry cake was to die for!  To absolutely DIE for!  It makes Grandma's cake taste like an old, stale, knock-off store-brand Hostess cupcake.

I spent most of the afternoon sitting on the deck drinking coffee, eating cake (I may have had more than once slice) and reading.  I've been on a massive reading kick lately.  I discovered a Scottish historical romance series, set in the 1300's, that completely sucked me in.  I've read three of them already, just since I got home from work on Sunday night/Monday morning.  (Sunday in my mind, but technically Monday.  Whatever.)

I've also been reading The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery.  Oh my!  This book is SO good!  I'm only a few chapters into it and I'm already tempted to toss my knitting aside and focus my time, attention and money on aquariums.  It's also got me a little hesitant to set foot on a boat ever again.  I'd never given any thought to having my boat attacked by an octopus before, but given my proclivity towards crazy, freak accidents....  I may have to give up salt water and stick to fresh from now on.  But even though I'm a little freaked about boating now, I still want a pet octopus.

So, I spent my 'morning' reading and eating cake on the deck, then spent the late afternoon/evening knitting on the deck with yet more cake and a bottle of wine.  Like I said, it was THE perfect birthday day.

So Faded sweater

I love how my cake, the wine and my sweater are all sort of coordinating purples and burgundies.

And then the sky turned an almost matching purple just before an insane thunderstorm hit.  They'd been predicting a pretty horrific storm for several days so it wasn't totally unexpected.  Sarah and I huddled up in an interior room and decided we should eat more cake and have another bottle of wine just in case the storm blew us off to Oz.

Thankfully, the storm did not blow us away, nor did either of us get sick from so much cake and wine.  Even better, we suffered no storm damage and our lights stayed on.  We were lucky!  There were so many trees blown down in the storm, schools were canceled the next day.  I think the birthday gods were watching out for us.