Happy Birthday to me!

Last week, I had the pleasure of experiencing my first annual 29th birthday!  The great thing about having a birthday on a Sunday (especially the Sunday where we set our clocks back for daylight savings) is that you can really milk the birthday - it turned into a full weekend topped off with a full 25 hours of actual birthday!

If you follow me on Instagram, you know the birthday weekend started right as any special event should...

Delicious Baby Bites from Pastry Art Cafe

This was a great surprise - I had mentioned to Tim weeks ago how we needed to get baby bites because our friend, Justin always has them for different things for work and will bring us the extras.  It was such a treat to come home from work on Friday and have these waiting on me!  Side note...all of the flavors are absolutely delicious - except carrot cake.  Why would you muck it up with carrot cake?!  It's like having those boxes of chocolates with different fillings and then getting stuck with the orange filled chocolate.  Just stick with the classics.

Saturday, we had absolutely beautiful weather!  After going for a quick run outside, Tim and I headed to Vizzini Farms, a winery close to Birmingham for lunch and a tasting.  Their chicken salad is really good!  The wine "tour" wasn't exactly what I was expecting - not your traditional winery experience.  But, the wine was good and we enjoyed sitting outside and relaxing.  We also got quite a show when one of the horses escaped from the pen - they were able to get him wrangled back in but it was a little tense when he was headed toward the open road!

Vizzini Farms

That afternoon consisted of some football (isn't the season over yet?!?) - between Auburn and my Dallas Cowboys, let's just say I'm pretending both the NFL and NCAA players are on strike - something a la NHL.   Then, I picked the dinner place on Saturday night - one of my favs - Chuck's Fish.  It did not disappoint!!  We finally tried some of their sushi as an appetizer and I had some great grouper.

Chuck's Fish - also, me trying out lipstick  :)

Side story, I used to mercilessly good naturedly tease my mother about her animal print habit.  You know, something along the lines of "grrrr, tiger!"  It was always just a little bit too out there for my taste.  Well, as I'm finding out more and more in my old age (hey...I am 29 afterall), mothers must really do know best:

Feeling trendy in my new pumps (from Target)!

Sunday, my actual birthday - was pretty low key, but relaxing.  After I insisted, Tim brought me breakfast from Shipley's donuts.  I've said it before, there's something just so special about having breakfast out/brought in.  We only do this on vacation and it just makes it feel like a special occasion.  Probably means we need to eat breakfast out more often  :)

We also did a bit of shopping on Sunday - more on that later and went out to lunch.  Sunday night was spent catching up on Homeland episodes - we started watching it on Demand and now we're hooked!  The last I can remember being this into a series was watching episodes of 24 back in its hey days - cliffhangers anyone??  We're now caught up to the live season and its killing me not to be able to just start the next episode!  We also caught this great sunset at a place right by our house (walking distance...we're lucky, we know):

Last week was a busy week at work, but when I arrived on Monday, my awesome team had this waiting for me:

Edgar's Cake...yummm!!!

So sweet!  Liz & I

Along with the thoughtful birthday cards in the mail, sweet phone calls and texts + major facebook loving, overall - I'm feeling pretty spoiled!

A few things I'm planning to/have already spent my birthday $ on:

Booties

Pocket Camera **

**I have tried to buy this camera TWICE from Costco - the first time they sold it to us.  We checked out and waited in line at the stock place and then they proceed to tell us they're out of stock.  Why of course they can't put the $ back on our card - have to refund in cash.  It usually takes me approximately 2 million years to make any kind of decision on a purchase, so the fact that I had decided, we'd paid and waited -This girl was majorly disappointed  :(  To be continued.

I also browsed the electronics at Target where the salesman tried to talk me out of buying a camera.  He suggested I get a DSLR and I told him I already had one, was just looking for something to carry with me at all times that would replace my old camera from college.  He looked at me and said "isn't that what your phone is for?"  Apparently they don't work on commissions...

Some Kindle books from Amazon

Also, speaking of trendy...Tim and I have actually had more than one conversation on "oxblood" - I just have to have it!  Okay, so I've been having conversations on oxblood and Tim's looked at me like I'm insane.  I'm not usually much of a red person, but this shade just gets me!

I've recently bought tights, leggings, nailpolish, lipstick, faux leather skirt (I really am getting risky), etc in this shade and although I don't know if this is exactly oxblood, I also treated myself to this necklace:

Necklace

A tip on the above:  There's a facebook offer to get the above necklace for $13.  I HATE clicking on offers on Facebook, but I'll let you in a little tip - I still have my gmail account with my maiden name, but this could work for any old email account - or even set up a spam only account (which I recommend - I use my maiden name email frequently when I have to enter an address to get an offer).  I created a dummy facebook profile with that old email address (so if for some reason you've found me as Lyndsay Long and I've declined, now you'll understand why).  I think I've successfully set it so that no one can search me.  I do everything on that profile that I don't want to do on my actual profile - connects with Spotify (or anything else you have to have a facebook profile for), claim offers, etc.  I used my dummy account and got the above necklace shipped for $13 total!  Sweet!

If the rest of the year turns out anything like the birthday weekend...I think 29 is looking pretty "sweet!"