Happy Birthday and other Random stuff

I wanted to post  yesterday, in commemoration of my son's and my sister's birthday, but I've been having a love/hate relationship with our internet the last week, and yesterday was definitely hate. I won't get into details, but suffice it to say that our internet seems to be possessed of body snatchers, and isn't as wonderfully consistent as it should be.

So, Happy Birthday yesterday to my wonderful son, Scott,

and my dear sister, Jennifer. Scott is 19 years old, and living (sometimes) happily away from home. Jen is ageless. and beautiful. Happy Birthday, I love you both! (The day Scott was born, I called Jen and told her that her birthday gift that year was a nephew. She was thrilled--they love sharing a birthday, and usually check in with each other to exchange birthday greetings.)

Tad returned to work EARLY Tuesday morning. Actually, returned isn't really the correct term. He has been in training for the last three months, and yesterday he arrived at the real jobsite for the first time. There will be a day or two of inprocessing and orientation, commentary drives and shop work, while he waits to find out which crew he'll be assigned to, and how the rotation works. This is, finally, real life.

We had a delightful time while Tad was home for the last week. We bought a new set of living room furniture, which I blogged a couple of days back, a new set of tires for the truck, set up the new computer, picked up an order of fresh peaches which took a week to ripen, ate dinner out a couple of times, replaced the starter in the truck, shopped for cold weather clothing for Tad, canned and froze the aforementioned  peaches, (12 pints of canned peaches, 14 bags of frozen peaches and 8 jars of freezer jam)

and hung out at a couple of craft stores in town. He was in town long enough to attend church twice, and we had 2 real date nights. It's the longest he's been home since he started training, so we got to spend lots of time together. It was hard to let  him go yesterday (Early wake times notwithstanding). Now that he's at the real job with the real shift rotation, we can start planning home times and away times.

As is typical when he returns to work, I spent yesterday catching up on little chores around the house, and did a little crafting. I sewed 2 aprons yesterday,

(autumn/Thanksgiving and Halloween--The red dotted one is one I made a couple of weeks ago, I think I mentioned it, but didn't have a picture--it's my crafty apron) and organized my seasonal decor, since this month is the time I start pulling things out to decorate. There is still more to do, but I have nothing but time.

My sister, Tamara, made this cute, little decorated "A" for my birthday last month, and I knew I wanted to display it, so I made this little scrapbook door sign.