Wednesday, August 01, 2007

And I Am Still Recovering From This:



Actually, Willow's birthday happened while we were in Canada, so she had to wait until we returned to have her kids birthday party with her friends. We held it at the YMCA pool - for a very reasonable fee you get to use their pool for an hour and they set up a classroom for you to use for another hour for food/cake/presents. Why did we do this? My friend Carrie warned me last year - never, EVER, hold a kids birthday in your house. You don't want them wandering about, you don't want to clean up after them - so why do it.

Here is Willow (with her soon to be patented squinty-drugged look) and her friend Julia (who seems to have no problem keeping her eyes open for the camera) in front of the Tinkerbell birthday cake. It was very yummy - yellow cake with lemon curd in the middle! (Yeah... if I am paying for the cake I want a say in what kind of cake it is - I don't care whose birthday it is...)



The little Tinkerbell figurine comes off the stand and becomes a keychain after the cake is done with. Which will be a while. There is still a 1/3 of a cake in the fridge...

Probably the present she has had the most use out of so far are her 'jewels' courtesy of Asami, Gara and Ray. Here she is looking all royal (...sigh... Must face the commoners now...):



Beyond that, I'm just exhausted and allergy-ridden at the moment. I've been spending a lot of time out in my in-laws' garden and last night I managed to break out in hives. I think it might have been because of picking all the tomatoes - but I have done that before and not had hives, so who knows. Two benadryl allergy tabs and I had the best sleep I've had since we returned to the US!

I started a new project out of Willow's school uniform necessity. It's a forest green neck-down cardigan from the poorest written pattern I have ever tried to knit. Seriously - three times now I have counted through the lines and found places where they have mis-labeled purl rows as knit rows. I'm going to go as far as the point where you divide off the stitches to create the sleeves and see what I have produced. If it still looks like a sweater despite the bad pattern, I'll continue with it.

Oh, and I finished the last Harry Potter book - Mollywobbles' fight scene totally did it for me. I won't go into an in-depth review because so many others already have. Right now I am in the second book of J. Gregory Keyes' 'Age of Unreason' trilogy, A Calculus of Angels. This series is fantastic - I don't know how I managed to miss it when it came out in the mid-90s. Oh yeah... I was in Japan. Still - if you can get a hold of them (Newton's Cannon is the first and Empire of Unreason is the last book), do so. I also started (and finished) Janet Evanovich's Lean Mean Thirteen on Monday night - a giggly good time - but she was with the wrong guy for my liking. The next book I will read after the Age of Unreason trilogy is Elizabeth Bear's New Amsterdam; I saw it in the new books section at my local library and it intrigued me.

Oh - and I received my first Knitty SP9 package yesterday - pics will be up tomorrow!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Love the jewels! She's very regal!

Batty said...

A kid's birthday combined with allergies is enough to do in just about anyone. Get some rest!

I kept walking past the Age of Unreason books when I was in college but never picked one up because I had too much academic work. Thanks for reminding me of their existence. I think it's time for a trip to the library!