Consistently, predictably, dependably, unwaveringly ERRATIC

Thank you for the birthday wishes!

It's been a quiet (and cool!) day day which I was glad of since I was awake way too late last night with a headache. But today was good. Starting with two packages arriving, one of them a Christmas present for Mum and the other an indulgence for me - this delightful Alice in Wonderland tea cup. I just couldn't resist it. And yes, I had my first cup of tea in it. Good timing!
 
We decided to have some take away for dinner (and maybe go to a restaurant later this month) since most restaurants are shut on Mondays. There's a very new Thai place close by and while I don't always like Thai and this place does a lot of seafood (which I don't eat), we'd had some food from there for Mum's birthday and it was delicious. So we went with that again and a St. Honore cake from Michels - which was suprisingly large for a 'small' cake! Mmm, profiteroles.

And then I was thoroughly spoilt with presents: a bunch of purple lisianthus, two CDs that I've been listening to tonight - Florence and the Machine's Ceremonials and OneRepublic's Waking Up (Mum asked me if the former was British; I gave her a blank look and said I didn't know, I'd never read anything about them. How very odd to have found new music via fanvids instead of RPF), three books - The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Invention of Murder by Judith Flanders and On The Trail of the Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell.

I saw the last a couple of month ago and immediately said it was going on my wishlist! I still adore the Silver Brumby books and they were among the favourite books of my childhood. Not just because of the wonderful secret world of the wild animals who could talk to each other but because of how Elyne Mitchell wrote about the high country, the mountains, the bush. She showed me the magic, the beauty and the mystery in my own land, not just the foreign or pseudo-foreign landscapes in my other books.

My last present was another beautiful teacup and I'm so lucky Mum manged to get it for me! We saw it at a T2 near us and I loved it but when she went back they were all out ... but they rang around for her and found that a store in town still had some and hey, we were going in to town in couple of days! And at one point there, she told me she had to go do something that I "did not need to know about." We always have fun Christmas shopping. *is amused* The ladies at the post office laughed the other week when we went it to pick up a package and Mum leaned in to take a look (I hadn't been sure what it would be - blank moment) and I promptly snatched it away. "No! You do not need to see!" I then explained why to the ladies in case they thought I was nuts.

And on top of all this, when Brother called he not only wished me Happy Birthday, he invited us over to dinner on Thursday. *is dumbfounded* That's ... twice in eight days we'll see them.