A long weekend, Mother's Day, and a birthday

Whoa, do I have a lot to blog about! I suppose I should have been blogging all throughout the whole weekend, because now I have to shove three days' worth of interesting things into one post!

Well, first off, this was a long weekend for me. My birthday was Monday and I've always thought the best gift you could give yourself is a day of relaxation...so I always use one of my vacation days when my birthday falls on a workday. Three day weekends are always awesome, of course!

On Saturday, the husband and I went out to the Volo Antique Mall. I love that place...it's huge and rambling and, even though a lot of the merchandise remains the same between visits, there is always something new to fall in love with. This time was no exception! There were quite a few things that itched to come home with me, but I resisted most of them...mostly from lack of a place to put them once I got them home, ha! There was a cute wooden recipe box that I briefly daydreamt about refinishing, a collection of adorable canning jars, any number of vintage cameras, a wonderfully adorable charm bracelet on which all of the charms were shaped like fruit (Was it Carmen Miranda's bracelet, perchance?), and a little chain garland hung with painted metal hearts. All I ended up bringing home with me, however, were a pretty orange-and-yellow metal bangle bracelet and an adorable kitchen scale with vintage-style foods painted on the dial. My husband bought a cool old photography book to add to our collection and a book of Patrick Nagle's artwork. How 80s of him!




Saturday night, we went out to a restaurant called the Kona Grill for my birthday dinner. We stayed in Kona, Hawaii for part of our honeymoon, and had been meaning to try this place out for a while. The food is contemporary Asian-fusion with a Hawaiian twist, and it was EXCELLENT. A wonderful experience all around, topped off with a passionfruit creme brulee for dessert. Divine! And a great excuse to get dressed up, too!




Then Sunday was, of course, Mother's Day, so we headed up to see my parents. (His live farther away, so unfortunately we only ever get to see my parents with any frequency.) We grilled out and snarfed hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad, and chips...a nice all-American type meal. Then, of course, birthday cake! Chocolate with chocolate icing, of course! My parents got me some nice presents...mostly clothing which I had carefully marked in catalogs, along with size and preferred color information--a strategy which I instituted in late middle school in order to stop receiving my mother's idea of what would look cute on me and start receiving something I actually enjoyed, ha!

Monday morning at exactly 12:00 am, when it officially became my birthday, it was my husband's turn. First, he handed me the sweetest and most amazingly perfect card ever. I actually teared up a bit reading it, and he congratulated himself...apparently, he'd predicted the card would make me cry, and it did! The goof! And then, two lovely presents to be added to the ones he'd given me early (the Movement-of-Waves bag from Anthropologie and the Fuji Instax 200 camera)... a print of a painting by artist Stella im Hultberg, whose style I adore, and "Plantworlds," a photography book featuring rich, lush macro images of flowers and plants. I'd seen the book in the store and fallen in love...it's exactly the kind of thing I do, and strive to do, in my own flower works. But art books are pricey and I talked myself out of buying it. So what did he do? He went right back to that bookstore the very next day and bought it for me, the wonderful man!





All in all, a wonderful weekend and a wonderful birthday. Since this post is already quite long enough, I'll stop here and post another time about the gifts I bought for myself at Anthropologie using the 15% off coupon they sent me for my birthday. So, a post to look forward to, right? :-)