May 22, 2010

My birthday has come and gone. Well, it's not officially over until my brother's present arrives, which should be by the end of the month. To celebrate my birth, my husband, daughter and our significant other, took me to lunch at a restaurant in Niantic. Actually lunch was a good idea since the restaurant was practically empty, which is not the case at dinnertime. Debbie and Jimmy gave me a beautiful freshwater pearl necklace with brilliantly colored pearls. It went beautifully with the earrings that they gave me a week earlier for Mother's Day. How clever. After lunch John and I stopped at a used book store "for a quick look". You practically had to drag me out of there! The place was a rabbit warren of sheds filled with books sorted by genre covering about an acre of land. There were also beautiful gardens, goats and a great dane puppy the size of a pony. It's definitely a place I want to return to. John found a couple of books (paperbacks are just $1.00) so he's set for a few weeks. For dinner, since it's against the rules for the birthday girl to cook, I went to Fish Tale for a lobster roll for me and fried shrimp dinner for John. Yum!

The week passed pretty quickly. Monday was the last mentoring session at the Middle School for the year. They celebrated with a pizza party. I gave Kendra her farewell gifts: some books from the series she's reading, some "silly bands", the lastest craze, and a box of monogrammed notecards that I made for her. After school I picked her up and we went to Dairy Queen for Blizzards. Rocky went with us and was in his glory with his own dish of vanilla ice cream. Tuesday I totally forgot about a scholarship meeting until I was getting ready for bed. Wednesday was my monthly club meeting. Friday night I had my monthly card swap group at the Papercraft Clubhouse. This month's challenge was to make a "shaped or folded" card. I made shaped cards from my Hello Kitty Greeting Cricut cartridge. Everyone loved them. Good...they were a lot of work! Today I had the second part of a class called "Creative Chaos". We made 8 tags using distress inks, alcohol inks and ephemera. It was messy but fun. I find that after 2 1/2 hours of creativity I tend to zone out. This class lasted for 4 hours! I have no idea what I'll do with the tags that I made but they were a good tool for learning new techniques. For dinner John and I went to Lenny's in Branford where I had their Shore Dinner: chowder, cherrystone clams, corn on the cob, steamers, lobster and a slab of watermelon. John had seafood bisque and a half-rack of ribs. It was really good.

I'm going to have to post some pictures. I finished my scrapbook from the cruise.

I'm so proud!

This weekend was Spring Conference for CT Junior Women (CJW), the parent club for my local Juniors club, Shoreline Community Women (SCW). I have been the president of the club for the past 2 years. Here's our 2-minute "elevator blurb": We are a dynamic community service organization made up of women age 18-180 who embrace the motto, "to grow, share, give and care" as we serve our communities and state. We are currently partnering with Covenant to Care for Children as our State Project. We provide placement packs for children who are being taken from their homes, backpacks for back-to-school, work with social workers to provide needed items for families in their caseload. In addition we have adopted a local family, supported the Shoreline Food Pantry, baked for AA meetings and blood drives, educated parents about the need for identification for children's car seats, provide scholarships and citizenship awards, make Christmas dinner for senior citizens and have a mission to send packages from home to servicemen and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan until all troops are home. At any rate, this weekend was when we meet up with members of all the clubs from around the state and receive recognition for our work during the year. On Friday 5 of us drove up to Bristol, CT for "girls night out". We went out to dinner and then spent a few hours playing "Apples to Apples" in our pajamas. Saturday was the actual conference and Shoreline was recognized as the best overall mid-sized club for the 2nd year in a row. More importantly, Sam the Bear, the award for the club who has shown the most support for our troops, has come back to us. I'm just so proud of my club members who have worked so hard.  I also accepted a position on the CJW Board. I'm going to be the District Rep for the S.H.O.R.E. District. I think my first duty will be to find out what S.H.O.R.E. stands for.