Birthday

The fireworks were for my birthday.  Mom always said so. 🙂   She told me while growing up that the 4th of July fireworks were for my birthday on the 2nd, it just took them a couple of days to get them set up. Every year, I get a little verklempt watching the fireworks and thinking about how I dislike living so far away from  my family and so far away from a mom who made a cool event even cooler for a little girl that loved fireworks. She tells me that we would go down to the beach to watch them and I vaguely remember this.  I don’t remember going anywhere to see them when we lived in Houston. Later when I moved here to Utah there were many places very close to the places I lived where you could easily see the fireworks going off in all the big parks and in BYU stadium.  From my front yard in Lehi we could see the fireworks from Thanksgiving Point. Here at my new house it’s a little harder to get a decent view but you can still see some of the high ones. This year regular folks were allowed the buy the 150 foot fireworks so we got to see quite a few of those from just in front of my cute little townhouse here in Orem. They were very enjoyable and I hope they didn’t cause a lot of extra work for our fire and emergency crews.

I had a great birthday. The kids blew up a large number of balloons and I even had a few minutes to enjoy them before they all enthusiastically began popping them. Joshua and Chynna made a cake and Joshua wrote LIE in large letters across the top.  AWESOME.

Many candles were then placed on top and happily we didn’t burn the house down.

Stash

My birthday stash arrived  🙂  My friend Wendy and my MIL Dawn gave me Knit Picks gift certificates and I went hog wild. Behold:

The bare yarn will be dyed with all sorts of fun colors, I just have to decide which. The circular knitting case will hold my ever growing pile of circular knitting needles.  I purchase three more of the Knit Picks nickel plated needles as part of my birthday stash.  The palette yarn is for a mitten pattern called Swedish Fish by Spilly Jane.

My combo birthday pressie/Christmas pressie/everything else for the year pressie from my mother was my fabulous spinning wheel. From my hubby a little over a month ago I got my really cool Toshiba Qosmio laptop. 18.5″ screen (yes, size does matter) Intell Core i7 processor with 8 GB of RAM 🙂

My poor knit night 🙁

For the past year I’ve been attending knit night at my local Borders. We met in the cafe starting around 6:00 pm and staying until they tossed us out. I loved that place, it was my first real encounter with a knit night and I adored being among “my people” as the Yarn Harlot calls it. Borders is closing all of the rest of their stores and last night there was a sign saying that the cafe will close this Thursday. We have to find a new place to meet. Because we met in a bookstore my daughter Danica would usually come with me and sit and read books while the rest of us spun or knitted. I enjoyed having a regular night out with her and I’m going to miss that. The Border’s cafe was a wonderful location. My knitting magazines were in easy reach for me grab as soon as they hit the stands. Fabulous caramel machiattos, and strawberry kula smoothies were nearby. We had comfy chairs and it was really close to my house. I’m really going to miss that place. We’re not even going to go into the social anxiety of going to a new place and probably without my support system in the form of Danica.