A Very Happy Birthday

[liralen]

I had a really good birthday, all in all.

The boys made sure I had a very good day, and I had quite the haul of gifts. The most fun, so far, has been "Kiki's Delivery Service", Garner's Modern American Usage (which amusingly enough, advocates the occasional and mindful use of the split infinitive) which I have been just reading through the way I used to read encyclopedias, and TWO lovely cases of Buckyballs.

Jet has been doing the video over and over again so that he can "get it right". It's pretty fun to watch.



The day itself was really good. Woke to a crisp fall morning with bright sunshine, cool weather, and the leaves were starting to change even in the neighborhood.

I promised the boys and myself that I would make pumpkin donuts for breakfast, and I *did* with one minor snafu. I used the King Arthur recipe for mashed potato cake donuts, and substituted pumpkin from a can the way they recommended.

But the pumpkin might be a little wetter than the mashed potatoes, so I had to add a great deal of flour before the things would hold together. John did a great deal of the fryer duty, but we ended up with far more donuts than we could eat. We brought the rest of them to church today for snack along with a dozen pumpkin muffins from the rest of the pumpkin from the donuts.

We hit the farmer's market as soon as we could, and picked up fresh sweet corn, a locally raised chicken, a cauliflower, some kettle corn for Jet, and a big batch of hot Hatch chilies. Then we went to Home Depot so my son could build a fire tug boat from a kit that he customized to do what he wanted. We decided not to do the walk immediately, and went home for lunch. We got hats, Jet's scooter, and went for the trail.

Then a five mile walk in the crisp fall sunshine with the trees starting to go gold around the edges, with scrub oak going deep fiery red in the shadows beneath. The St. Vrain River was actually running today, unusual for September, and it was a lovely walk with my husband with my son scootering along-side. We enjoyed all of it.

The afternoon was filled with Kingdom Hearts II with my son, and then making a lovely roast chicken dinner with a chicken from the Farmer's Market that tasted like what an actual chicken that gets to run around, eat bugs, grow at a normal rate, and dies quietly tastes like. I also made and indulged in a cauliflower gratin with plenty of cayanne, cream, and crumb son top; and we roasted the last of the summer sweet corn. I managed to also satisfy my craving for hot apple cider, and my husband made a chocolate zucchini cake for my birthday cake and it was still warm enough to melt the candles. *laughs*

The fun thing was that most of the leftovers went to our church for snacks so we don't have to deal with all the other calories from making those goodies. *laughs*

Today was filled with church in the morning, being snacks and coffee. That was kind of fun with everyone. Jet went off to a radio-control field nearby with a friend and his dad, so they had a blast, and I was able to do a little drawing. From there we headed to the Biloxi Planning meeting, which was really a good excuse for a shrimp boil and assigning people to various jobs like getting plane tickets for everyone, and doing the planning for the big fund raiser in February.

It was fun, and there were more than twenty people, and the pot luck was nice. They included chicken nuggets so Jet had something to eat. That was good.

Other wonderful presents included cmc42 making me a lovely Shun/Uki wallpaper for my birthday.

And darkprism_fics commissioned, kiriban'ed, and just forced Reality to Change and got Grimmalkin's art block to drop right at the same time, and I now have three amazing pieces of utterly funny, gorgeous, and hot Yaoi artwork on Y!Gallery. Check out my journal there for pointers.