Exceedingly Young!

Well, thank you, Blippers, for all the nice birthday comments! I've been off the Blip radar for a couple of days while we've been traipsing back and forth across the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, but now I'm going to engage in that dreaded thing called "back blipping" and get a little caught up! See? I'm becoming an "old hand" at this Blip thing (although "old" is not a word for a birthday blip; in fact "old" and "birthday" are seldomly words I ever string together in a single sentence.) Exceedingly young, hip, groovy, even (to the horror of our children) jiggy with it will be among the descriptive adjectives used in this blip!

When these flowers arrived this morning promptly at 9:00am, my first thought was "take a picture of them right now, because we might not be here tomorrow to enjoy them." No, not some esoteric commentary on getting older (being exceedingly young and all), but rather a comment on the fact that we're seldomly in one place long enough to enjoy the full life-span of an arrangement of flowers!

No matter where we are in the world (literally), somehow Chris always manages to have flowers arrive sometime during the day on March 23rd, even if it means I can only enjoy them for that day because we're moving on to someplace else on March 24th. It's never deterred him - he's a hopeless romantic at heart, and for that I'm eternally grateful!

The next thing I thought was "hey, I can capture some close-up flower shots right here in the comfort of my living room!" So, I immediately set about trying every last setting on my camera, attempting to replicate some of the amazing macro shots you nature lovers regularly post. Suffice to say, I have a long way to go, but thankfully, my good friend Deb posted the most spectacular picture of a rose on my Facebook page today, and I'm now in the process of trying to figure out how to take full credit for it!

All kinds of wonderful things arrived throughout the day today - cards, texts, wine, fruit, chocolate cake, complete with candles! Say-yen took me to our local spa for some pampering and then to our favorite noodle shop for lunch (but not before a quick stop at the local shoe store for a new pair of flats, because no birthday is complete without a new pair of shoes!)

To top it all off, when I got home, refreshed, relaxed and re-shoed, I was surprised to find Chris had left work early, so he could race home and start preparations on one of his infamous steak dinners for us to enjoy with the wine and chocolate cake! Could a girl ask for more?!

All in all, it was a wonderful day, and nothing will help me remember it more than these beautiful roses. When we got married, my wedding bouquet was a simple arrangement of the most beautiful white roses, so every year Chris makes sure there are white roses among my birthday flowers. Yes, to the chagrin of our kids, we may not always be hip, groovy or even jiggy with it (horrors!), but my greatest desire is that we remain, for all time, hopeless romantics! (And, ok, maybe exceedingly young!)