Birthday Fun!

General Update

This year my birthday landed on a Thursday (my lifelong favorite day of the week) and I took the day off from work. It was right before a super busy weekend, where I would have a huge booth at the DeKalb County Quilt Guild’s quilt show. My mom and sister are in the guild and helped to organize, hang and participate the show, and I had so much prep to do for my booth, so my family decided to celebrate the Monday after (which I also took off).

On Thursday morning I worked on things for my booth, and Matt surprised me by making it home early from work. Since I didn’t expect that, we hadn’t made any plans and I scrambled to find something fun to do. I turned to Pinterest and searched for lists of things to do on your birthday. It ended up offering a wealth of ideas. One of items said “go to the beach” and I remembered how I’m always wanting to check out this local campground’s beach. Another list item that caught my attention was to go to a photobooth, and I had been wanting to visit the digital one at the movie theater since before the pandemic. There are a bunch of photochemical booths in Illinois, but they are mostly in the city, and mostly in bars. I’ll try to hit up ones when I can, but right before the pandemic I had a realization that I’m wasting so many photobooth opportunities by being snobby about what type of booth it is, and we have a digital booth right here in town. More items that caught my attention was to visit the pet shelter, and go out to eat.

I bought myself a pot of Echinacea that had magenta, orange and yellow flowers for a birthday present to myself

We went to the booth (which is in the lobby) and naturally it only took cash, so we moved on, and headed to the beach. We got to the campground, but I’m guessing that since September 22nd falls on the first day of fall and after Labor Day, the beach was closed until next year. They did however let us drive around and look at it from across the pond/lake thingy. We stopped at a gas station and got some cash from an ATM and then headed back to the booth. Wouldn’t ya know, there was an error screen on the booth. Not to be turned away again, I found the plug, unplugged it, and plugged it back in and it loaded up and worked! Next we hit up the animal shelter. I joked and said “I’m so excited that I’m getting a kitten for my birthday”, as we have a small house and 2 cats that only tolerate each other as it is. We looked at the small animals, cats and kittens. There was a cat that looked like Bishop and now it was Matt’s turn for a joke when he suggested we go run home real quick and get Bishop and swap him out… no one would know any better.

By the time we got home it was time for dinner. We had tried to go to a new local mexican restaurant last year for my birthday but the wait time was too long. So we decided to try again this year, and because I love walking so much, we walked there. We just got margaritas and split a nacho platter and I’d say it was just ok, nothing to write home about. Maybe their entres are better? We still miss the mexican restaurant that closed during (or shortly before?) the pandemic on the other end of the block. We’d walk there on Thursday nights and have drinks and nachos there regularly.

Honestly, it was a perfect day. I could sleep in, take it easy, do creative stuff, and check off some things I’d wanted to do for a long time with my honey.

Apparently I didn’t take a single picture of my booth at the quilt show. Here is a pic of the quilts on display. My booth was on the far wall in this pic. I finally put together labels for my stationery sets, so they’d be more display presentable.

In my etsy shop they are sold in 5.75×4.5 cellos, because I can share pictures of what the stationery actually looks like. At shows, it’s harder for people to get that same idea when the product is all folded up and sealed, so now I have sets that would work at shows and in shops. The back has thumbnails to show what each set includes.

On Monday my sister, brother’s family and I went to Russell Woods to do a little hiking.

I used the Seek app often to learn what certain plants and mushrooms/fungi were.

Then we went to the photobooth again, as I wanted to get more pics with all the kids. Naturally, the machine was down, but this time it was DOWN-DOWN. Not sure if they’d run out of paper, or it needed service, but we’ll have to come back another time.

In the meantime, the kids all climbed into my sister’s car and pretended it was a photobooth. Afterward we picked up my mom and went to Red Robin for dinner. After dinner we went to my brother’s house to open presents. I got some yooperlites, and a flashlight to see the glow (and to help us discover more, next time we go to the Dunes), some honey from my brother’s hives, and …