Happy New Year and a quick catch-up of last years doings

Wow! I didn't realize it had been so long since i'd been here. Summer (the season) came and went and brought with it lots of laughter and fun and then we went into the holdiay craziness between halloween (which is not technically a holiday), Thanksgiving, Christmas and here we are the week after New Years.

So, let's see...going backwards...

December:
*Movies with Margaret. We took advantage of having a couple of weeks off and went to see Ps. I love you. She loved it and cried-a lot; I liked it, but didn't cry. It just made me want to go to Ireland and continue my search for the perfect, fun male. Apparently, they're all living in Ireland.

*Dance Party at Christine's house. Turns out you can only do so many dances when you have monkey arms before they all start to look ridiculous. Great music and lots of laughs! Good Times.

* Crazy winds (80+ mph!) kick up ash from the Wildfires and make the sky an eerie brown colour, very reminiscent of what it looked like in July when the fire was at it's height-scary! They also kick up enough ash each day to completely cover your car and turn it black with ash and soot. Good news was that once you started driving it just blow right off.

I spent lots of time sewing thanks to the sewmamasew.com website lighting a fire under my sewing machine. I pledged to handmake all of my presents this year and am proud to say that I was able to accomplish that with minimal whining, crying and seam-ripping. Note: for some reason that i am unable to figure blogspot will let me add pictures of my projects, but i can't move them. So, in the interest of keeping an orginized blog I am not going to add them until they can live in the correct spot.

In the latter part of december I spent time with my friends Summer and Christine at Christine's fabulous new house having a craft and sewing day. Didn't get a lot done (due to a one hour apron taking about 6 hours to sew), but we had some great laughs, sang some Christmas Carols, ate a great lunch, and watched many amazing things come out of the kitchen.

There's Summer (left) and Christine (right) wearing the aprons I made for them. Summer's is from her 80's themed birthday party (it has strawberry shortcake fabric) and Christine's is from Christmas. She had just been lamenting how she wished she had an apron when she saw Summer pull out hers and watched me cut out one for a friend. Teehee...she didn't know i'd made one for her! I gave it to her right after she mentioned it and boy was she surprised!

One of Christine's friends (tara?) made this lovely little California Cookie. She actually made a man too, but I didn't get to see the end result.

Earlier in the month Summer hosted a Sunday Afternoon Tea and Book Exchange at her house. I was able to find both a hat ( a lovely white felt number) and a beautiful dress (from H & M) at the thrift store. The hat was all of $1.99 and the dress was "half price" coming in at a whopping $2.50! Not too shabby. I even bought a couple other dresses, but this one fit like it was made for me.

That's me on the left and Christine in her borrowed hat looking fabulous as always. Boy, I tell ya growing your hair out AND wearing a hat might not be the great idea it's cracked up to be. I really wished someone had told me that my hair was sticking out like 2 little antenna's and maybe I should have pulled the hat down a little. Oh, well, it did look pretty nice all things considered. Especially since for me it was a "do-over" from summer's 80's themed birthday party where my outfit sucked! I had been wanting a do-over for a long time and since she wasn't going to have another 80's party I figured I'd better do it right for the tea party/book exchange.

The table layout for the tea party before it was demolished by hungry tea drinkers. Summer spent a lot of time making the food and labelling each thing. It was just gorgeous! You'd never know that a half hour before the party started that she was bailing water out of her bathroom!

November:

Everyone I know (okay, not really, but it was a lot of us, including me) had a birthday in late October through November.

For my birthday I wanted to go out dancing, so in the interest of not looking comletely scary, my friends met me at the mall and helped me pick out a swanky top to wear with my swanky jeans. We first went to dinner at the Sojourner restaurant and due to me not being able to eat cake there (or anywhere for that matter) one of my friends, Nancy got the waiter to make up a plate of orange slices drizzled with chocolate sauce and the whole waitstaff came over to sing happy birthday. Awwwwww! We then decided to brave a club that we thought would be fun, turns out our idea of fun and other peoples ideas were completely different. Since when did it become okay to be rude to people! I have never seen so many rude people in one place! Blech! Once we realized, simulaneously, that the dj had been playing the same song for the last 20 minutes and that we just couldn't tolerate all the nasty-attitudes we decide to wander a block over to another club that had a dance floor about the size of my kitchen. However, the dj was really good and we soon got our dancing mojo back (although, that being said, the dj did recycle some of the songs-in the same order about an hour later, much to our surprise and dismay). We met some, um, very interesting men that wanted to dance with us. Let's just say that...well, I don't even know waht to say about them, except that they were good dancers, but as for getting social clues...didn't get a one! Oh, well, we made it fun!

Thanksgiving turned out to be extrememely stressful! I decided not to cook a turkey this year simpy because they are very expensive (when you buy organic) and I don't really eat that much of it. So, all I did was prep, cook, clean for two whole days! NOT FUN! And because I didn't have a turkey to guide my cooking time I ended up with things that didn't finish at the same time. My cornbread dressing was too soggy; the butternut squash casserole was cold; the salmon was cold by the time it got to the table. And then...when I was done with the eating and yes, the washing of those damned dishes (again!) I still had to make the pie. I'd decided on a apple crisp, which can't really be made that much in advance, so I still had to make that after everything else. Never again! Oh, and keep in mind I also had made a homemade breakfast, so i'd made breakfast, the thanksgiving meal and then for fun made a desert also when all I wanted to do was sit the hell down! Note: Christmas and New Years were much better :-)

October:

The cutest baby (sorry, no picture due to blogspot issue with moving photos) was born on October 31st! That's right, my friend Adriana had her own sweet little pumpkin on Halloween. Keep in mind this is after months and months, well, nine to be exact of her exclaiming that no way, no how was she going to have this baby on Halloween. She was scheduled to have him on November 2nd, but she ended up having to have him a few days early.

Christine had her birthday party. Christine decided that she'd have a karoke party for her birthday. Let's just say there was a lot of singing, dancing anda a whole lot of laughing. My cheeks hurt the next day from laughing so much. Christine's friends from back east, Ethan and Stacy came to visit. We hit it off so well, that we all wanted them to move out here! Somehow I don't think that's going to happen, but we're still going to dream.

September:

Don't remember much about September, but a return to "normal". In other words the summer ended and it was time to get back to our regular jobs. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!