Birthdays

Yesterday's Surprise Birthday Gift!

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to celebrate birthdays. My parents adhere to a religion that strictly forbids the celebrating of birthdays. My first experience with a birthday party was at my first job after technical school when there was a birthday party every month for anyone whose birthday fell in that month. Each month had a committee to plan the birthday party. It was great fun, and the beginning of my love of all things birthday. It’s where I learned that birthdays are fun.

Eleven years later a lot has changed; I’ve moved to a different state, gotten married (to a man who’s a Christmas Eve baby), and have a different job. However, I still love all things birthday, and have the fortune to be around people who really get into celebrating birthdays.

Yesterday at work I walked into a lovely early birthday surprise from some of my co-workers. They took the time to choose my favorite flowers and candy. One of the things I love about my job is the fact that we celebrate co-worker’s birthdays. I always bake a cake of the birthday person’s choosing, we all go out to lunch together, and sometimes small gifts are given. It’s really nice because, let’s face it, a lot of us spend more time with our co-workers on a daily basis than we do our families. It’s nice to know that the people you spend 40 plus hours per week with are glad you were born.

Of course, co-worker birthday celebrations don’t replace birthday celebrations with family and friends. I love the traditions and fun that go along with birthday celebrations for my friends and family by marriage.

Since Nick is a Christmas Eve baby I always make sure he has a birthday party that has nothing to do with Christmas. It’s usually chili and a cake that in no way resembles anything Christmas-related. The cake has been everything from Star Trek to frogs.

My best friend Crystal almost always chooses grilling out for her birthday celebration. Her birthday is in early May, so the weather is usually perfect for being outside and grilling. We usually try new marinades or grilling something new.

Because I dislike the cold weather so much and my birthday is in early April, we almost always drive down to South Carolina to go to Riverbanks Zoo. It’s always warm there by then, and the garden is in bloom. I love it.

There’s always cake, too. This year Nicks’ mom and step-dad, Alan, (whose birthday is late March) were in town close enough to celebrate our birthdays together with a chocolate cake with an antique truck for Alan and an adorable white cake with pastel flowers and butterflies for me. I don’t like chocolate at all, so it means a lot that they go out of their way to get white cake for me.

So what about you? Do you love birthday celebrations? What are your traditions for celebrating birthdays with family and friends?

Angel Oak

My parents both grew up around the Charleston area. They got married there, and lived there for several years. Then, for reasons I will never fully understand, decided to move away before my sister and I were born. (We’re still South Carolina natives, we just don’t have the privilege of being Charleston natives.)

I love the Charleston area, and have for as long as I can remember. Though we very rarely went there, my parents talked about it a lot. Hubby and I vacation there more than anywhere else. Every time we’ve gone my mom has said we should see the Angel Oak while we’re there. We always meant to, but somehow never got around to it. Until last year.

We finally drove out to Johns Island in November of last year to see the Angel Oak. I’m not really sure what I was expecting. I’d heard my parents talk about it for years. I’d looked it up online; I knew it was supposed to be a huge, beautiful old oak tree.

I wasn’t prepared for how enormous or how breathtakingly beautiful it was. Angel Oak is basically in a state park, down a little dirt road next to an old church. Your expectations aren’t raised as you get closer. But then, it’s magic.

The size and beauty of the tree take your breath away, and it just fees like a magical place. All of the numbers about the biggest branch, how much area it shades, how old it is, go right out of your head. You walk under the canopy of the tree, and you feel like you’re in a different world.

So what about you? Have you been to see the Angel Oak? Did you think it was magical?

A to Z Blogging Challenge

There’s nothing like waiting until almost the last minute.  Last night I finally signed up for the 2015 A to Z Blogging Challenge.  You can read more about it (and sign up!) here.  Basically, it’s a challenge in which you blog every day except Sundays during the month of April, based on the alphabet:  A on the 1st, B on the 2nd, and so on.  

It’s fun, it’s a good way to “meet” other bloggers, and it’s a great way to help get in the habit of regular blogging.  I’ve actually meant to sign up for a while, but time somehow managed to get away from me.  I do have a few pre-scheduled posts, so I feel like I’m starting off a little better than I have before.  I finished in 2012, dropped out before it began in 2013 due to some health issues, and didn’t finish in 2014.  2015 needs to be a good year!  

Once again, I’m not doing a theme.  I came really, really close, but just didn’t want to fully commit to one theme.  I have mixed feelings about themes.  It seems to be recommended that you have a theme, and it seems like a lot of folks do.  I can see the point; it probably helps with organization, and some of the themes are really interesting.  I just feel like, for me, a month is a long time to write about one topic.  We’ll see how it works out.  

So what about you?  Are you participating in the A to Z Challenge this year?  Are you planning on a theme?  

Five Good Things About the Cold Weather

I really don’t like the cold weather. I can’t stand to be cold, and the cold, gray days seem to suck the life right out of me. Winter is hard for me. It has been for as long as I can remember, and it just seems to get worse as I get older. If I’m not really, really careful I can totally get sucked into a bad case of the winter blues.

We had a little bit of snow and a fair amount of ice last week. There was a brief warm up yesterday, but the temperatures have plummeted again, and we’re looking at a pretty likely chance of more snow and/or ice this week. Not the weather forecast I was hoping for.

I seem to be teetering on the edge of getting sucked into a bad case of the winter blues, so I decided to try really hard to come up with something (anything really) that can be good about the cold.

I came up with five:

1. The cats are really cuddly during the cold weather. They’re indoor cats, but they spend a lot more time sleeping, and they’re much more likely to cuddle up with each other and with us. A cuddly cat (or four) is wonderful.





2. I get to dress the dogs up in their coats, sweaters, and pajamas. I love dressing up the dogs, and the cold weather gives me a good reason to. Emma loves to be dressed up. I think she feels pretty when she wears her pink. Duke associates dressing up with food, which is his favorite thing ever, so he loves getting dressed.

3. Winter weather can provide something to blog about. Sometimes it’s a struggle to come up with something to write a blog post about. Winter weather presents some fairly obvious things.

4. Cold weather is soup weather. Cold weather is a good reason to make soup, whether it’s an old favorite, a new recipe, or a brand new experiment. Hot soup is delicious and comforting on a cold night.

5. It makes us appreciate the warm weather. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the absence of warm weather definitely makes my heart incredibly fond of it. I cannot wait to feel the hot sun on my skin, to plant the first flowers and vegetable of the season, and for daylight to last well into the evening.

So what about you? Do you enjoy the cold weather? If not, can you come up with at least one good thing about it?

Would You Want to Know?

I read an interesting blog post today about a woman and her wife deciding to have their DNA examined for their anniversary. They both had a general idea of their ancestry, but were also surprised by a few things. It’s a well-written post, definitely worth the time to read.

Some of the surprises included some pretty scary health issues, Alzheimer’s for one.

Using your DNA to learn about your ancestry seems to be becoming more and more common, or maybe I’m just more aware of people doing it. One of my co-workers did it not too long ago. He split the cost with his two sisters and provided the sample because apparently you can learn more from a male than a female. He didn’t mention learning anything about health conditions, but did mention a few ancestry surprises.

I do not claim to even begin to understand the science behind it. Science has never been my "thing". I’ve found it somewhat interesting when people have talked about it. I enjoyed the blog post, it was interesting hearing some of what my co-worker learned, and Nick and I once spent a very enjoyable evening listening to one of his aunts talk about their Native American heritage.

All of that being said, I’ve never really felt a need to discover my roots. Sure, there have been fleeting moments of thinking it might be interesting to learn about some of the less obvious parts of my heritage, but I don’t think that’s what makes me who I am. Maybe it factors in some, I’m not sure. Like I said, I don’t claim to understand the science at all. And honestly, it costs around $100.00. There are lots of other things I’m much more interested in spending $100.00 on.

Finding out about possible health issues was something I hadn’t really considered. If I’m being honest, it’s one thing that tips the scale in favor of not investigating my DNA. I understand that, to an extent, it makes a lot of sense to be aware of health issues that run in your family, and do what you can to help yourself. But to go out and look for possible issues seems a bit like asking for trouble to me.

I don’t think I want to know that my genes are somehow tainted. Take the Alzheimer’s for example. Three out of my four grandparents have or had it. The fourth died in a car accident at 56, so may well have had it too, had he lived long enough. This scares me. A lot. It scares me for my parents, and it scares me for myself. Any time my dad forgets to pass a message on to my mom there’s the icy voice of fear whispering in my ear that both of his parents more often than not don’t know where they are, what year it is, or what’s going on. Knowing that our genes are tainted, that’s it’s likely, would turn that whisper into a roar. And I’d wonder when those bad genes were going to get me. I don’t want that. Alzheimer’s currently isn’t preventable. I’d rather hope that maybe it’s not as hereditary as people think. I’d rather spend that time, energy, and yes, money, on something that isn’t going to keep me awake at night worrying.

Maybe I’m unreasonable, maybe I’m taking too narrow of a view on it, but I just don’t see the point in setting out to find out something that might really upset you, especially if it’s something you can’t really do anything about.

So of course I’m curious. Have you had your DNA examined? Would you consider it? Would you want to know about a scary disease?