Friday birthday bullets - June 7, 2019

Today was my birthday, and a lovely day it was.

• During the summer, J. gets Fridays off. It's lovely. Today was our second Friday, and we are loving having him home for an extra day every weekend.
• We finally have warm and dry weather. Hooray!!
• I have one garden planted and will spend the weekend planting the other one. I still have a lot of seeds to put in, so I hope that we have a warm fall so they have enough time to produce actual vegetables.
• I got to spend part of my birthday at Horse Power, the therapeutic riding program I volunteer with. I love the combination of horses and special people.
• J. has been working on building stalls in the barn. He is part way through the first of three. The most difficult part is figuring out how to make everything work.

• I also got to ride Emmy a bit today. The big news is that I was able to canter on her briefly today and lived to tell the tale. She is calming down and having P. here to ride her as well is incredibly helpful in getting her back to rideability.
• We had dinner tonight at a pizza place with stuffed pizza. Even better than the pizza was having all my people at dinner together. I love that. I love them.
• The older children got together and bought me a very nice knife set. They all admit that it was partly for them as well, since everyone felt as though my knives were old and not terribly easy to use. 
• I took people to the library today to sign up for the summer reading game. Many star stickers have already been stuck to the booklet where they are to keep track of the minutes read.
• At the restaurant tonight, because someone had mentioned it was my birthday, the waitress brought me a piece of tiramisu and had everyone sing. Little did she know my very large crew does not go in for public displays of singing, so it was a rather soft and hesitant rendition. At least some people did actually sing. Other people, mainly L., quickly vanished under the table when they realized what was supposed to happen.
• M. was describing the baby weasel who was at the wildlife rehabilitation center where M. has an internship. Evidently baby weasels are very cute, very soft, and filled with murder.
• Rosebud the barn cat continues to hide in her box, but she is eating the food set out for her. This morning, as I was making sure she could get to her water bowl, she allowed me to rub her back briefly. She also looked for a moment as though she might rub my hand with her head, but then thought better of it and went back in her box. It's a small bit of progress.
• J. bought all the younger people squirt guns at the store today. There was much water spraying (outside) for a good part of the afternoon. 
• We have named the African geese Agatha and Dahlia, as in Aunt Agatha and Aunt Dahlia from the Jeeves and Wooster stories by P. G. Wodehouse. They just seem like Bertie's bossy aunts. If you kneel down near them, they will come right up to you, stretching their necks out, and honking very loudly. They aren't aggressive, they just have a lot to say. Loudly. And they don't really go 'honk', it sounds more like 'hoink'. They are very funny creatures.