The car says Happy Birthday to me by....

...starting to smoke out of the hood, again...and the window got stuck...unfortunately the window got stuck down... Yep, the driver's side window is stuck in the down position, and the dealership can't even look at it until Monday and their estimate on what it will cost to fix..around $400. I'll be honest, it didn't make me too happy. But I guess it could have been worse, like rain, or snow, or frigid cold temperatures. We had lots of errands to run so we ran them anyway. At Blockbuster and Kroger, one of us would stay in the car while the other ran inside. Then we both had to go into Target so we took everything out of the car so that no one would reach in while parked in the parking lot and take something. (I kept secretly hoping the entire time we were in Target that someone would just steal it so we could get another car.) Then we went to Olive Garden for my birthday meal. (I was hoping someone would steal it there too.) It was delicious!

And soon I'm going to get my favorite pie for dessert! Marie Callendar's Razzleberry Pie with lots of vanilla ice cream! Yum!

Overall Assessment of Birthday (minus the car part): Great!!

Ahh, the new feeling of ivory keys...

Ok, so maybe not really ivory keys. Santa brought me a keyboard so I could start playing piano again after taking a 8 year hiatus. I'm so excited....so excited in fact that I spent all of Christmas Day pulling out all my old piano books to see what I could still play. Then I played more after work on Wednesday....then I woke up Thursday morning and my hand/wrist hurt so bad that I kept having to take breaks at work because it hurt to use the mouse on the computer. Oh well! Thanks Santa!!!!!!!!!!

Christian's 1st Annual 29th Birthday

Which means that next year will be his 2nd annual 29th birthday.

Here's the cake I made for him:


Yes, I know that the penguin is more of a dark green/blue instead of black. I had the black Wilton coloring, but for some reason it turned out green, not black. Maybe next time I'll mix it up really, really well before adding it to the icing.


These pictures of him turned out really well!

Cupcakes

Here is a new cupcake creation that I'd like to call "Lemon Eclair Cupcakes". Basically I used a lemon cake mix to make the cupcakes. After they were cool I used an icing tip and filled them with cool whip. This is the first time I've ever tried to fill cupcakes and it was much, much easier than expected. After that I made some lemon icing and used another one of my new icing tips to add a little yellow flower on top and topped them with fresh raspberries. Christian said they were the best cupcakes he's ever had! I thought they were pretty close to the top of my list too!

As if cooking wasn't hard in the first place...

Christian has now decided to be a vegetarian. A OVO-LACTO-VEGETARIAN to be exact. This definition was pulled from a vegetarian website: "Ovo-lacto vegetarians are vegetarians who do not consume meat, poultry, fish, and seafood, but do consume eggs and milk. This is the largest group of vegetarians." Everything he likes of mine including enchiladas have chicken and/or beef. At least he'll eat eggs and milk still! So...anyone have any good recipes that fit into this category?

You win some, you lose some...

This week at work there was a contest to see who could design the best holiday mailer. This was right up my alley so I decided to create a few cards to enter into the contest. See below for the cards I entered. (Some are a little non-traditional but if you go to the website of where I work you'll see why) The winner would get to produce all the cards (for a fee of course!) and be credited on the back of the card. It had to be non-denominational and be international as well, since we're an international company. Friday came around and the announcement was made.

No-one. Yep, that's right, they didn't choose any of them.

And the funny thing was, it didn't even surprise me because that's just how Jonathan Bailey is. He's extremely picky. The CEO said it was because he gave us the wrong guidelines for the card competition but it's really because Jonathan didn't like any of them. Oh well!

But on a better note, I got my first real card client this week! I'm doing 450 wedding announcements for her. I'll post a picture of her announcement once I get the ok from her. Just think black, white, and a monogram. Very classy! Anyway, enjoy the non-traditional holiday cards!