Last night I got together with my book club friends to celebrate Jana’s birthday. We had a great dinner of grilled steak, monster baked potatoes with all the fixings, my favorite spinach salad, and rolls from Shirley’s bakery. Unfortunately, I messed up dessert a bit. We were having homemade brownies with ice cream and caramel sauce. Somehow I overcooked the sauce so it was sticky enough to take your fillings out! (I hope that didn’t happen to anyone…) We watched An Ideal Husband, which I haven’t seen for years. I remembered really liking it, but I absolutely loved it. What a treat to see it again. Rupert Everett was so charming and likable, not to mention gorgeous!
But my favorite part of these gatherings is the gift-giving. We gave Jana a gift certificate to her favorite nail place for pedicures and a hand-made birthday book, masterminded by Jenn. Now we've cycled through the whole group with the birthday books and are not sure where to go from here. The books are so thoroughly enjoyable that we're tempted to just do it again, yet we don't know if we have enough ideas, quotes, etc. to keep making them different. It's a conundrum.
In other news, Lucas is feeling back to his old self and went back to school yesterday. Hooray! Max tried to go to school because he had a big presentation to do yesterday, but ended up having to come home around noon and is home again today. Good grief. He's missing three big tests today. It felt so good to get out last night after being largely homebound all week with sick kids, yet today I've lost that loving feeling and the cabin fever has returned.
I have spent three hours this morning just trying to load the photos from our celebration last night. Hating dial-up more than I ever have before. I created an action in Photoshop that automates saving photos to a web-friendly low-res format so I could upload them faster, but after an hour, they were still only 10% finished loading to Smugmug! I thought I was going to tear my hair out. I ended up having to do it all over again, 5 photos at a time... at this rate, I may have to give up on updating my galleries. But I do have one for Jana's birthday party if you want to see the whole birthday book that we gave her. Thanks again, Jenn, for making another awesome book!
6 comments:
The book turned out beautifully, and the night was enjoyable as usual. I wish I wasn't so mental about my creative endeavors and the lameness therein, but I guess I'm still learning how to handle my "pangs" of envy.
The carmel did end up getting hard, but it sure was tasty.
I was happy with how the book turned out, and even happier with Jana's reaction! I was so glad she liked the colors! And everyone's tags were perfect! That is my favorite part, when our pages come together to make this little record of our friendships- a treasure indeed!
The food was amazing (including the overdone caramel) and I wish we had more birthdays to celebrate- it is always so fun!!
Thank you, Michelle, for writing this. Ditto to everything said. I'm still speechless about you all, my fabulous friends. You are so creative and generous and thoughtful. I thoroughly enjoyed my evening...my favorite kinds of food, a cute movie (which I must watch again while the boys are at Fathers & Sons), a most generous gift certificate (I can't wait to have cute toes all summer!), and a birthday book that I have absolutely no words for. Thank you all for being you.
You guys are very blessed to have the group of friends that you do. I'm glad you were able to get out of the 'sick house' for a night! (Jill- that looks like your page, and it looks very cute!)
You guys are very blessed to have the group of friends that you do. I'm glad you were able to get out of the 'sick house' for a night! (Jill- that looks like your page, and it looks very cute!)
What a great idea for a book. That would be an excellent gift for anyone. Sounds like you guys had a great time and fabulous food.
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