Happy Birthday to Me!

We begin our story of the Birthday celebration on the day before my 25th.

 After working during the day, I picked up Michael (the subaru was in the shop) and we headed to the fancy-schmancy mall for some quality Williams-Sonoma time. This used to be a common occurance back in our Pittsburgh days when W-S was just up the road on Walnut, but we don't seem to get around to it as much here, which is probably a good thing for our bank balance. The first things you should notice are the cheese slicer and veggie peeler on top of the pretty box. We bought those purely because we needed them. Our former veggie peeler, for example, would peel off about 1/4" of whatever you were peeling. It wasn't very efficient.

 The really special splurge was in the box. This pretty rosemary colored Le Creuset not only will be very functional to us, but by purchasing the limited edition color, we helped in the fight against childhood hunger (Le Creuset donated 25% of the purchase price to Share Our Strength, on of my all-time favorite charities).

 The plan was to break her in by making some slow cooked carnitas (yum!) but as most of you know, Michael is not the quickest in the decision making department so by the time we got home at 7:30 (we go to sleep at 9) we used it to throw together some quick beef tacos. They were good but I am anxious to use her for a better purpose when we are back to normal next week.

I spent the early morning hours of my 25th Birthday on the 10th floor of Barnes Jewish Hospital dropping off a piece of equipment.

 At least I got this wonderful view of the sunrise over the city. If you enlarge the photo you can clearly see the arch on the right side. Don't worry, my day got better.

 After another long day at work, we were both beat so we did something we never, ever do: we ordered way too much delivery food from Dominos. I must say, their spicy hawiaan pizza was pretty amazing.

Michael was also kind enough to make me (the cake-baker) a Birthday cupcake (that we shared because I was too full to eat a whole cupcake). As you can see, he and Pep did a wonderful job of singing to me and making my Birthday special. 

Oh, and thanks to everyone for the great cards, texts, emails and facebook messages. You made a quarter-of-a-century no so scary :-)