THE BEST BIRTHDAY GIFTS: love, technology and inspiration.

Although I didn't write about it yesterday, I had a great birthday.  My husband made me dinner and my youngest daughter made me a lava cake. 

Yum!

I got a beautiful new scarf from a dear friend.  It is soft and warm, and makes me wish for cold weather so I can wear it.

I also got a cool new toy:

I've been wanted one for a while and apparently my wonderful husband caught one of many times I mentioned it.  :)  I love it!  Right now I am mainly reading the books you can download for free.  But Barnes and Noble knows what they are doing. 

They gave me a free download of the first six chapters of this book:

Pride and Prejudice is one of my all time favorite books, and this twist really intrigued me.  So I started reading, and started laughing, and was really quite annoyed when I reached the end of the free promo.  But luckily the rest of the book was just a click away.  And now I am enjoying the rest of the story.

The only downside is that buying that book was almost too easy.  I am going to have to be careful or my book budget will be busted every month--especially since I really don't have a book budget.  :D

And yesterday the mailman became my favorite person by stretching out my birthday one more day.  On my doorstep I found a package that contained this:

It was sent by one of my dearest friends.  Elena is an artistic soul and has always been my muse.  Many of my craft projects were tried as a gift for her.  She has another artistic friend that makes these great pieces of art.  She collects trinkets and makes fun shapes and sayings out of sculpty clay and then assembles them into frames. 

Elena has several of these in her house, and I study them every time I am there.  I'm sure it's no shock that I really want to make one and have since the first time I saw one.  And although I haven't gotten around to it yet, I do have a frame already set aside for the project.   I just need to take the time to collect things to put in it.  But until then, I now have one of my own to look at and inspire me.  

Getting older isn't so bad after all!