Birthdayness

It was my birthday yesterday and what a lovely day I had!

I met up with my little sister Emily in town and we had cocktails and lunch. I took a snap of the cocktails with my phone camera as I was so taken with the colours of them. Emily's 'Apple Passion' ranged from bright green through to that wonderful aqua (Blue Curaçao) at the bottom. It tasted even better than it looked! My 'Summer Peach' was yellow with swirls of cranberry. It should have been orange with swirls of cranberry but the bartender was all out of orange sherbet so I had lemon instead. It tasted lush!

Em came home with me and then Sally, Paul and the little'uns came over for pizza and birthday cake in the evening.

I'm going to make a slight diversion here but stick with me and it'll all tie in.

The other day I decided to wash the pillows off my bed and give them a freshen-up. They're just feather pillows from M&S and the label on them said to stick them in the washing machine on a 40° wash and then tumble dry them. So I did just that. But for some odd and bizarre reason they came out of the tumble drier smelling of what I can only describe as wet dog. You know the smell - dog-hair-grease mingled with river water. Musty, damp and rank. I stuck the pillows in the airing cupboard thinking that they just needed a good old air, but no, after ten hours they still stank of wet dog. I Googled it and apparently even if the label on your feather pillow says you can wash it, you shouldn't. Great. So new pillows were called for. I decided to grab a lift with Dad when he dropped Em off at Southampton train station last night (she's living in Bournemouth at the moment) so that I could go to the 24 hour Tesco on the way home to buy myself some nice-smelling pillows.

Right, that was the diversion so now we're back on track.

Just as we were driving into town we saw swarms of Southampton FC supporters all over the place. The traffic was awful because of the the football match that had just finished and getting to the station would have been a nightmare so Dad decided that he was going to give Emily a lift home ..... all the way to Bournemouth! So we had a bit of a road trip there. Em (who has a much better sense of direction than me) directed Dad to her boyfriend's house via all these back roads and shortcuts. This was all very well and good but when we'd dropped her off Dad was a bit disoriented. I won't say lost because he's normally got a killer sense of direction and is like a human GPS system. Dad did have to give in (after we'd passed the same bingo hall and dry cleaners twice) and use his actual GPS on his phone to direct us out of Bournemouth and we were eventually on our way home. We got to Tesco at midnight and I bought two fresh-smelling pillows. Huzzah! At least I didn't have to spend another night feeling as if I was resting my head on a smelly damp dachshund.

Anyway, bead stuff. I posted on my website that there would be beads for sale tonight. Slight change of plan - it will now be at nine o'clock Friday morning instead.