Plus Four

The party began early this morning when Tarzan wished me Happy Birthday before he left for work at 6am. There have been songs and phone calls all day, including the kids on the Academic Decathlon team and an awful lot of felicitations on the Facebook. Thank you all, it's been sweet.

After the usual toiling of the day Tarzan and ATL took me out for dinner - to CPK of course - and then home for cake and presents. Presents! I received lovely cards from family and the ever faithful RHM:

A replacement drawer organizer from ATL:

Our original one was pretty thrashed. Tarzan presented me with a brand new set of kitchen knives, excellent stuff and I am so excited to chop something:

I'm ever so grateful to Rocketgirl for introducing me to this concept of recapping the year on my birthday. I really forget what's been done and in what order. There has been a lot of work done in this last year.

• Physical, with the house purchase, the repairs and the improvements.
• Lots of holes dug - there's a post in the works about that.
• My suddenly being a quasi-teacher and having students and other teachers rely on me for things.
• Emotional, with all the paperwork and worrying about technical things for BHB and ATL.
• The motor for the gate to our back yard was stolen.
• Had to reinstall Windows twice on this laptop and then replace the hard drive. It's holding steady now but there's still time.

There have been less heavy events as well:

• Celebrating three years blogging
• And nine years with Tarzan.
• Being there when PhatFiddle and Leizel got hitched.
• Got to catch up with some family I usually only see on Facebook.
• Found some new friends in the blogosphere.
• Was part of the Census.
• Celebrated a lot of birthdays, including the birth-day of my brother's daughter. That makes four nieces and four nephews. I like to keep it balanced.
• I'm not sure which side to put the whole raccoon escapade on but since no one got hurt I'm going to leave it here.
• I rescued, hand-fed and still have two new kittens. (There's a whole long post I need to do about that situation as well.)
• I held this blog's first contest and we actually had a winner and I actually sent her a prize.

Other than that it's been the usual whining and busy to my eyeballs with church and family and school and volunteering and household stuff and cats and yeah...the usual.

This is me, 34.