Happy Birthday

Yep, another one has rolled around but I feel like I have been celebrating for a week, with more to come.

The quilting group met yesterday back in our usual location. My pal Marilyn was able to come to the meeting and I had offered to pick her up. She made me a birthday cake! It is easy for her to remember what day as her son and I share it but Ronnie was getting a cheesecake. I got chocolate cake with yummy icing and purple flowers! You will just have to imagine what it might have looked like since we cut into at the meeting and I told the girls to take some home if they wished.

The girls were also so sweet to give me some bday spending money. I feel funny being singled out this way since we don't celebrate every one else's bdays in the same manner even if I am the group leader. Still, it is kind of them to do this for me. I will have to give some thought to how I will use this gift.

I thought my friend Teresa might be joining us for lunch so we did a sandwich run and went back to eat at the church in case she made it. There are 8 of us with bdays spanning from May to September so next time, we will be off to Olive Garden to celebrate those summer bdays for sure! Not that we need much of an excuse to go to Olive Garden, LOL.

Monday, I had taken some small appliances over to the thrift store. You may remember my saying that I subscribe to the theory of "something in, something out"? 4 in 1 grill in so electric fry pan, etc out. I had to drive around to the back of the building for the guys to unload my car and I spotted their exercise equipment back there. DJ's exercise bike is missing a few teeth in the gears and is probably not long for this world so I told him I would check and see if they had some at the thrift store while there. Nothing, at this time that looked like a possibility.

BUT they had a little TV for $25 bucks that had a far better picture than mine. As you can see above, we didn't come home empty handed. Part of my bday on the "spend down" bday money plan. I can't have too big of a set in here as space is limited so this is perfect. We totally forgot to ask where its remote was but any universal remote would work if you can get a code to enter according to brand. Don't really have to have a remote for the set in any case but for set color, brightness, etc.

Bless the tech support at DISH for walking me through the set up! You just can't plop in another TV and expect it to run--- silly me! They needed to have me pull up an on screen menu, scroll left and right, up and down manually with the channel and volume buttons to auto program in some channels plus give me a code for the remote. I am back in business with a nice sharp clear picture. I am pretty sure now that the DVD player is what is causing the intermittent picture cut out, not the rest of the set up. I don't need the closed captioning but I cannot figure out how to shut it off. That option is grayed out on the DISH programming menus and I don't see it listed on the Magnavox menu screen options. Oh well! The old TV? To the thrift store or there is a chance Marilyn's mom might want it.

Saturday the FABs and I will have my virtual bday party gathering on IM so I can open the quilty gifts they have made me. Pam and Cher have had their turn. I'm in the middle. Pat and Norma both have fall birthdays. One tantalizing package is already here, waiting and the others are on their way. I should give the mail person a "heads up" as she is going to be pulling in the drive and honking a lot this week, LOL. THEN we are going to sew together! Project: Skinny Strips that I recently finished kitting up. Should be fun!

Now you can see why I said in the opening statement that I have been partying all week with more to come? DJ and I will go out for lunch in a bit at a place of my choosing---and eat more of that yummy chocolate cake.

I plan to sew a bit on my Disappearing 4 patch today. I made enough blocks last evening to finish out the 4th row--24 blocks, in other words and joined into rows. I am currently 1 block short of two rows (11 blocks) for the bottom two rows---the duplicate blocks that are pieced. LOL, if I had not been recording one program and wanting to watch the season finale of "White Collar" I would have kept sewing and might joined rows 3 and 4 and then joined them to rows 1-2. Neal and Peter won out!

And sew it goes around here---------