A Birthday is just the first day of another 365-day journey around the sun.  After several years of avoiding the whole birthday issue, I'm once again embracing it.  I had a wonderful birthday.  Dennis gave me a beautiful necklace--chocolate colored fresh water pearls.  One of the secretaries in the office made brownies in my honor...and they were delicious.  Everyone in the office signed my birthday card.  Teachers wished me happy birthday. I got a couple hugs from students. My co-worker nurse Brenda gave me a beautiful pink mug with blue & purple butterflies--and little "flash card" laminated Bible verses to help me through the more challenging days at work.  

Tonight I cooked a Rachel Ray recipe: Prosciutto wrapped chicken stuffed with herbed ricotta.  It was wonderful. Served with mashed potatoes and a salad...next time I'll be sure to do a more colorful vegetable than mashed potatoes.  Beets perhaps. Or carrots.  Note to self: remember to take a photo next time.

The weather.  Tonight low of 40...tomorrow high of 50.  Friday night at the football game...dress warmly.  Oh...rain is also in the forecast.  :/   Of course when we finally get that hard freeze, I can stop using Nasonex.  Today I had a small nose bleed, so the sooner I can stop, the better. Except for the minor nose bleed, I'm impressed by how well it is controlling my allergies.

Tomorrow is spirit day...we are wearing Cardinal shirts to celebrate their "wild card" in the world series status.  I think I'll be wearing my t-shirt over a turtleneck...

No school Monday...3 day weekend coming up. WooooHoooo!

For those who revel in the Halloween traditions are already planning or even creating their costumes. My daughter Hannah is one of those.  She is going to be Honey Boo Boo.  She made this decision before she had one her research, ie, watching back to back to back episodes of the program.  When she got to the "sketti" episode, we texted for a while...double dog daring each other to try mixing "butter" (it was obviously margarine) and ketchup as spaghetti sauce.  No takers.

At the middle school, no costumes allowed on Halloween. However, I plan to wear my glittery black with orange pumpkin knee socks and black skirt (with bright green argyle sweater) tomorrow. (Sneak in as much Halloween as I can the entire month of October.)  That will be a huge improvement over the brown pants and blah shirt I wore today. Friday is "spirit day" and we are supposed to wear a Cardinals shirt with our jeans.  Fortunately I got found an inexpensive Cardinals t-shirt a couple years ago that I can wear. I'm not a big baseball fan.  I much prefer high school or college football and basketball.

Time for bed...to face a new day tomorrow

It seems I brought back a little gift from the place in Oldfield...chiggers...or red bugs if you are from Louisiana. Dennis hopes to go test the well (bringing a rented generator) on Friday.  We need to know about the well and where the property lines are before we either make an offer or decide it's not the place for us and move on.  

Cable guy came...is name was Bob.  He replaced our old cable box with a tiny little box.  And they are finally going to get rid of the "jerry rigged" set up we've been dealing with for YEARS.  We used to have underground cable til it was cut multiple times by our neighbor...and they set up a shoddy line from the telephone pole to the house...and it wasn't even grounded. So on Thursday, they are going to come back and do it right.   Meanwhile, the new cable box (which isn't shorting out every  few minutes) is great.

Tomorrow night is First Wednesday club.  Italian food is the theme.  I'm doing a white trash lasagna--using canned ravioli for the meat & noodles, cottage cheese for the ricotta cheese, canned diced tomatoes for the sauce and bag-o-italian blend cheese. It's amazingly good.  And about all I can throw together after work. 

Happy Birthday to my dad from his favorite daughter. 

The skies were dreary but the trees are showing more color every day.  Our maple in the back yard is turning.

All I can say about work is that it was a Monday.  Lots of stomach aches, headaches and a little puking.  Grocery shopping after work.  I thought the cable guy was going to be here between 5 & 7.  The "fix" of resetting the box the "robo call computer" did was temporary.  When I got home I discovered the power had been out and we had no cable or internet.  Someone had cut the cable fiber optic lines.  That may or may not be related to the power outage.  I reheated our soup--which was convenient because Kroger had a package of pita bread marked down from $1.79 to 89c.  Hopefully tomorrow the cable guy will fix our problem.  And I'll figure out what we are eating for supper between now and then. 

Nothing has happened to change our hope that we can resolve the well/property line issues on the place in Oldfield and buy it.