Tag Archives: Celebrations

Friday’s Fave Five!

This past week has been full of some memorable events. Seems most of these events centered around food. Makes me wonder if I should just give up on losing weight, but this is a post about favorite things so onward and upward.

Topping the list of favorites was the fact that our daughter was here with us for several days. We walked on the beach, did some vintage shopping, attended her good friends wedding, and ate a lot of good food.

Worship on Sunday was really powerful with a challenging sermon about the Holy Spirit. There was a wonderful sense of unity in the Body that was really cool.

Katie and I made a trip to Glendale Forest Lawn and it was stimulating to see so many beautiful works of art. The grounds are so well kept and the little churches are filled with beautiful stained glass.

This is the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather at Glendale Forest Lawn

One of the favorite food items this past week was this hot fudge sundae Katie and I shared at the Tam O’ Shanter after our trip to Glendale Forest Lawn. It is served with the original fabulous C.C.Brown’s hot fudge that seriously tastes like very good candy! I can’t remember the last time I had a Hot Fudge Sundae! I’m salivating just thinking about it!

On Wednesday I met my Women’s Bible Study ladies at Cheesecake Factory to celebrate Fran’s birthday. We had such a great time laughing and enjoying each others company and celebrating Fran! Ok I’ll go ahead and show you what I ate…

So anyone want to place a bet on whether or not I gained weight last week??

Please visit the lovely Susanne at Living to Tell the Story to join in the fun or to see other Fave Fives!

Photobucket is holding all my photos I stored with them from 2007-2015 hostage unless I pay them a lot of money. I’m slowly cleaning up many posts from this time period and deleting their ugly grey and black boxes with a ransom request. Such a time consuming bother.

Family Celebration

After I picked up Katie from LAX we headed East to Whittier for a family gathering to celebrate Katie being here and Letty and my birthday.

 

My sister Kathy and my mom. My niece Michelle and Katie. My sister Vera and SIL Letty.

 

My niece Michelle and Melissa with my Grand Nephew Jackson. Michelle, Jessica, and my sister Lana. Kathy and Lana. Oops…I managed to miss getting my niece Debbee in any of these and she’s probably quite happy about that :0)

 

For dinner everyone brought along a favorite Chinese take-out item to share and my mom made this birthday cake for Letty and me along with those flaky delicate yummies on the right which are called Kudrishky. Kudrishky are a light flaky Russian dessert that is made from a dough rolled very thin, curled and fried. After they cool you dust them with powdered sugar.

 

The birthday girls! These extended birthday celebrations are a fun deal!

Photobucket is holding all my photos I stored with them from 2007-2015 hostage unless I pay them a lot of money. I’m slowly cleaning up many posts from this time period and deleting their ugly grey and black boxes with a ransom request. Such a time consuming bother.

Birthday Girls at The Tudor House

My walking Bloggy buddy Willow was blessed to be born on St. Patrick’s Day (which makes her exempt from the wearin o the green) I was born on the 14th of March. We decided to celebrate by taking tea in Santa Monica, California yesterday. Willow happened to have the day off and we worked it to our advantage.

Happy Real Birthday Willow!

 

We drove south along the coast to Santa Monica. This British Corner on 2nd and Santa Monica Blvd. has the Tudor Tea Room and Bakery,  Ye Olde King’s Head Shoppe, and a British Pub.

 

Look at that! They set all the tables in Willow’s favorite china pattern…Willow! We enjoyed eating our food and drinking our Earl Grey with these great Churchill plates, cups and saucers.

 

After our tea we strolled through the British shops and pub that was all decked out for St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations.

You can see Willow’s reflection in the mirror. Darn! We forgot to have someone take a photo of us taking our tea!

 

We headed for Ocean Blvd. to catch another glimpse of the Pacific before heading home.

This was waiting for me when I got home and it’s exciting and scary at the same time…

 

This is my birthday present from Dear. I’ll let you know if I figure out how to put it together and use it! :0)

Have a wonderful St. Patty’s Day!

Photobucket is holding all my photos I stored with them from 2007-2015 hostage unless I pay them a lot of money. I’m slowly cleaning up many posts from this time period and deleting their ugly grey and black boxes with a ransom request. Such a time consuming bother.

58 Years Ago Today!

Today we are taking a walk on the beach at Dawn.

After our early walk we’ll stop at Allison’s in Ventura for breakfast.

Later in the day we have dinner reservations at Tam O’Shanter in Los Angeles.

I’m thankful to God for his hand on my life all these 58 years. He is good to ellen b.  I love Him in return and hope to learn to love and appreciate my God and Savior more this new year he is giving me…

Blessings on your Saturday!

Let the Celebrations Begin…

 

I’ve never been one to shy away from celebrations and since I’m not getting any younger I decided that I need more than one day to celebrate. Now Lovella is enjoying her Jubilee year and that deserves a whole year of celebrating but for my 58th year I’m claiming the next 60 days to celebrate. That way I’ll get to celebrate with my kids, too, when we go to Seattle for Easter. My celebrations will culminate with Mother’s Day!

My actual birthday is March 14th and this year it happens to be National Pi Day I found that out from The Scrabblequeen Knits, too. And she also let me know it’s Albert Einstein’s birthday! With all this excitement happening this weekend I decided I needed to get a jump on my celebrations so I don’t get overlooked.

 

Dear is already treating me royally (what a guy). He ordered me a new SLR camera that is arriving sometime next week. He made reservations for dinner on my birthday at  Tam O’ Shanter in Los Angeles. My niece Michelle and Ryan have been going here for special occasions and we’ve been wanting to try it since it comes highly recommended. Michelle posted about the restaurant here.

Hmmm, Willow’s birthday is on St. Patrick’s Day so maybe I’ll suggest to her we do a little something next Tuesday to celebrate both our birthdays…

 

Next Wednesday my daughter Katie arrives for a week to visit us and attend a wedding of one of her friends from Wheaton College. On that Wednesday my extended family is getting together for a bring in Chinese Dinner at my sister’s house in Whittier. (Everyone who comes will bring a take-out Chinese dish of their choice for us all to share.) My mom is baking a cake to celebrate my birthday and my SIL Letty’s birthday that night. How sweet it is. Sometimes it’s hard for us all to get together so we don’t have any problem with combining celebrations when we can get together.

 

And just so all this celebrating doesn’t go to my head I’ll continue my daily chores and I’ll keep exercising and I’ll make it a point to share the love with other people around me and treat them to some fun, too. But most importantly I’ll remember the One who gives me all good things to enjoy. Thank you Lord!

Photobucket is holding all my photos I stored with them from 2007-2015 hostage unless I pay them a lot of money. I’m slowly cleaning up many posts from this time period and deleting their ugly grey and black boxes with a ransom request. Such a time consuming bother.

Tablescape Tuesday ~ Black and Gold

Welcome to another round of Tablescape Tuesday hosted by Susan at Between Naps on the Porch. Today I’m sharing the table I set for an early birthday dinner for our two sons. Both of their birthdays are in January and Dear and I will not be in Washington on their birthdays so we decided to celebrate with them while we were still in Washington last Friday night.

 

I bought these great black and gold dishes at Target Christmas clearance. I got 8 dinner plates and 8 salad plates for under $30. I thought they had a more masculine feel than some of my other dishes for the guys!

 

The heavy black iron candle holder for the centerpiece with the Fleur de lis design was a find at Goodwill a while back. Again, I liked the heavier bulkier look for the guys.

 

Christmas clearance at Target was great. I went on the day everything was 75% off. The Fleur de lis napkin rings were under $5 for 8 of them. The little gold cocktail napkins were $1.24 for a 4 pack. The two pack of goblets that I decided to turn into candle holders were clearance also but I forget how much. The shimmery gold tablecloth was originally from the Pottery Barn that I bought at Goodwill. Now the really great thing about this tablescape is that we actually sat down and ate dinner at it. It was a great time of celebrating Josh and Dan’s lives and thanking God for them and how they’ve enriched all of our lives!

 

Josh is married to Laura and all four of these young adults graduated from Inglemoor Highschool in the Northshore School District of Washington in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.  They chuckled at the fact that Black and Gold were their High School colors! Go Vikings! My sister Lana G! was able to join us for our dinner celebration, too. Fun times….

For more Tablescapes around the blogisphere visit Susan at Between Naps on the Porch.

Photobucket is holding all my photos from 2007 to 2015 hostage and has replaced them all with ugly black and grey boxes asking for a ransom to have them re-published. Such a frustrating bother as I go through each post to delete the ugly boxes.

Engagement Party in Clovis, California

On Sunday we hit the back roads North to Clovis where my cousin Jim who married my college buddy Jeanie live (Jeanie and I met when we both were Home Economics majors at Cal-State, Los Angeles). Their youngest son Jeff asked Heather to marry him and she said YES! So because of the excitement of it all an engagement party was planned. Here’s the happy darling couple…

I told you they were darling. See that fabulous blouse she’s wearing? Jeff bought that for her while he was in Italy with his family a few weeks ago. Good taste and it looks smashing on Heather.

Clovis is about 4 hours away from us by car and we didn’t just get there by snapping our fingers so I’m going to show you some of the scenes from the route we chose to take this time. We went on a back road through Ojai on Highway 33. This route took us over and across the Los Padres National Forest.

 

It was very dry and hot (but 10 degrees cooler than Saturday). We saw lots of interesting landscape. Lots of huge bolders that looked like they could fall on us around several curves. The tunnels and canopy of eucalyptus trees were very cool. We finally made it over the winding roads through the forest to the flat lands of Central California. We went through an area of oil refineries and saw this great old oil Derick.

We arrived for the main event at Jim and Jeanies and the real fun began. Jim and Jeanie have a Spanish style home on a very large piece of property that is just perfect for large gatherings of people. They’ve done a beautiful job with landscaping and adding great features to make the house and yard invite you in.

 

There were lots of people and great food that Jeanie with my cousin Katrina’s help prepared themselves. Appetisers, Russian Chicken (MGCC recipe), Beef with aujus and salsa on the side, pasta salad, fruit salad, and rice pilaf. Yummy! One of Jeanie’s girlfriends from her Bible Study made all the cookies, heart shaped brownies and cookie bars. I love how she decorated the cookies. I asked her if she’d come to my next party with some of her fabulous cookies :0)

 

But the best part of the day was seeing old friends and relatives and getting re-acquainted and caught up a little with each other.

 

Jeanie and Ellen b. ~ Jeanie’s Swedish roots welcome sign ~ Jeanie with her sister Kathy B. ~ My cousin Katrina with her husband Andy and daughter Kristen ~ The engaged couple Heather and Jeff ~ Jeff’s older brother Ben ~ Ellen b. and Dear ~ My cousin Jim praying for the couple and meal ~ Cousins: Jim, Ellen b, and Katrina.

Hi Katrina…I know you are out there now :0)

The last time I saw Kathy B. (Jeanie’s sister) was in 2005 at a different celebration here in Clovis.

 

This face to face meeting was very special for me because since 2005 Kathy B. and I have both started blogging and I have gotten to know and love her more through our blogs. It’s just something special to meet with bloggy friends face to face. Kathy B. blogs over at Count it all Joy. She truly has chosen joy through her suffering and has a special place in my heart.

Thanks for the wonderful party Jim and Jeanie. Congratulations Jeff and Heather. It was fun celebrating with you! May God bless you and the uniting of your families with His love and joy!

Photobucket is holding all my photos that I posted on my blog from 2007-2015 hostage and replaced them with big black and grey boxes with threats. So discouraging…as I’m slowly trying to clean up thousands of posts!

Happy Birthday Lana & Leonard

A Very Happy Birthday to my Sister and my Brother!

Yes, they are twins…

 

Lana, I thank God for you and pray that He blesses you with all things good this coming year. Thanks for all the fun times we have together, shopping, exploring cemeteries, eating, and blogging together. Joy, Joy, Joy is what I wish for you!

 

Leonard, I thank God for all the new things He has filled your life with this last year! Wow, He has really blessed you richly and it makes this sister overwhelmed with joy for you and thanksgiving to our God. I love you my brother!

Since it’s her birthday why don’t you head over to Lana G!’s to see a photo of her and my brother together sporting a fabulous hairdo!

Photobucket is holding all my photos from 2007-2015 hostage on their site and have replaced my photos with black and grey boxes of ugliness. I’m slowly deleting those boxes from my blog and trying to update so many posts, very frustrating.