My Birthday

I started my birthday off early by going to work for a 5:30am shift. Joshua, ever optimistic, said I should think about how much of my birthday I got to be awake to enjoy. Things went pretty well at work though; I had extra stuff to bake off because we were giving away mini cookies for my birthday, so it kept me busy, but was fun to have cookies everywhere. With all the cookies to give away and everyone wishing me a happy birthday, it did make the morning feel celebratory.

Here's the picture Heidi took and put on the bakery's facebook page with the caption, "Today is our sweet roll master baker Sarah's birthday! We've got little mini cookies we're handing out to celebrate today. Yay!" These three trays are about half of the sweet rolls I bake on Saturday mornings.

I got home to discover that Joshua had added a beautiful rose to the collection of birthday love on the table. I opened a couple presents after our late breakfast, but saved the rest to open after dinner. Joshua took me to get tacos for lunch at a place he just recently went to for the first time and that was fun and delicious. We got to watch most of the SHEMA concert that Evan, Micah, and Natalie were performing in through a live stream of the show. It was fun to be able to see that even though we are a state away. After the performance, we hurried outside to do some planting during a period of sun. We ended up missing the sun and got some rain on us instead, but we were able to plant two raspberry bushes that one of my coworkers brought to work last week; her parents have a lot of bushes at their house so she had dug some up from there to share with us. We also planted rhubarb, strawberries, and chamomile. I'm pretty excited about our coming garden, so that was a fun birthday activity even though we got rather wet and dirty and my old outdoor shoe fell apart during the project.

For dinner, we got to try out another new restaurant. We don't go out to eat often and there are so many great restaurants in Eugene, so it was really fun to get to try two new places. 

One of my fellow bakers has told me a few times about a place she really likes called Party Downtown, so we decided to try it out. The name seems strange to me and didn't fit the restaurant, which was really well designed, but we were impressed. They sat us a great little table by the window and we got the kitchen's choice dinner where they bring out a number of small dishes to share so you get to try out a bunch of different things and never know what's coming next. Our dinner included a variety of pickled vegetables, a deep fried egg, fried king oyster mushrooms with a buffalo sauce, dates stuffed with duck confit and topped with candied pumpkin seeds, beef tongue with a soft boiled egg, shrimp on toast, a baby kale salad, pacific cod with charred cabbage, horseradish, and sorrel, and pan seared duck breast. Everything was delicious and the presentation was beautiful. It was a long relaxed dinner with great food; we both really enjoyed it. 

 

 Back at home, I finished opening the presents my family sent me and my gift from Joshua, then we completed the great day of celebrating with a board game and, of course, apple pie.