What a day it was! Yesterday I turned 32. It’s kind of the same as being 31, only with a rounder number (and quite possibly a rounder waist?). Wanna know what I got? I cleaned up good, yo!
Let’s start with this gem. It wasn’t actually a birthday gift, but it might as well be. Last week I won a contest at Crossway books and they sent me a brand new leather ESV Study Bible! It’s gorgeous. And I love reading it. Love, love, love the single column text, the really cool study notes and great illustrations. It’ll take a bit of time to get used to a format that’s different from my chain reference Bible, but that was NASB and this is ESV, and oh, I love it.
Then there was this. I married a man who does not cook. Does not generally step foot in the kitchen unless it’s to clean up a mess, make a sandwich, or well, let’s be fair, make coffee. I told him a week or two before my birthday that I only want 1 present. A homemade cake. Made by him. He laughed at me. Asked which bakery I’d like my cake to be ordered from. But I insisted, and he came through. Oh, how he came through. Look at how beautiful it is! Look how he decorated it! And oh, if you could taste it… But you can’t. Because I ate the whole thing. Well, I shared a little, but I would have eaten the whole thing. Holy smokes, my man can bake!
He had a little help. Only in my house we sometimes spell help as h-i-n-d-e-r!
Got milk?
And then I got this. I’ve been carrying a well loved Coach bag (a Christmas present from a while back) for a couple years. And the leather is wearing thin. And it’s starting to look a little raggedy. So my mom got me this. And check this out. My new Claire V. purse was made by women in Cambodia who have suffered the tragic consequences of genocide and land mines. And it’s silk. Silk damask, in fact. And oh-my-gosh-gorgeous!
And then I got this book, which is great. And this one too. It’s my 3rd copy of that one – I keep giving away my copy… And a few accessories for my iPod, err, iPot, as Bean calls it. And best of all, my kids gave me some lovin.
We ended the day in my room with my iPod hooked up to my new iPod speaker (thanks, hubbs!) while me and my kids danced to Ingrid Michaelson, and finished that off with a few lively rounds of ring-around-the-rosie. Good times.
It was a great way to ring in 32.
What does surprise me is that any serious journalist would turn it into a story. Come on, people. Is anyone delusional enough to think that Russian officials exercise transparency, honesty, and integrity? Sure, there might be one or two – and it would be a much better story to find out which Russian officials (if any) have scruples, and if so, how on earth they got into their positions.
From Halloween – the dragon/dinosaur/aligator, the giraffe, and the witch.
The big question is, how many of their Facebook page visitors and fans translate into transactions – either online participation or actual revenue stream? Or have we moved past transaction thinking into a realm where traditional stats don’t tell the whole picture?
