The tea party went well. I managed to not poison anyone with allergies and the gals liked the cashew cream (left out the date). They also seemed to like their prizes. Just enough ladies came that everyone was a winner. Each gift included one unique tea-related item and one or more of those microwaveable rice heat-packs in either mustache or dinosaur fabric, because you can never have too many of those. I've never made them in hand-warmer sizes before, so those will be interesting to try once the cold weather gets here.

As I sit down to write this, I have come to the realization that last time I posted all about my childhood memories with Sarah, so I actually have a month’s worth of my activities to catch you all up on. At least I’m not starving for material, right?

A few weeks ago I got to go up to my high school bestie’s little boy’s birthday party, which was fun. We sat around, talked, and read from The Giant Book of Crap—our notebook of terrible, hilarious things that we (and other people around us) said back when we were in high school. A lot of it wasn’t funny anymore, and some of it we’d forgotten the context of, but the remainder kept us in fits of giggles.

A couple of weeks ago, the hubby and I went to Summerfest. We didn’t find the vendors and activities of the fair all that interesting, but there were a few yard sales going on and I picked up a couple of items from a free box somewhere. The most interesting thing was probably  walking through the Brown House and looking at all of the weird historical displays they had up, including a collection of historical toasters and a display on Victorian mourning customs.

I’ve also spent a lot of time recently getting together presents for weddings, a baby shower, and a tea party that I have coming up. My favorite was probably the one I did for my husband’s cousin. I started with a rice cooker, then gathered together things to go with it. Obviously if you have a rice cooker and the typically included rice-cooker accessories, then you need less common rice accessories like a special rice-washing bowl and a small ladle. I also added a bunch of sticky notes with my own personal tips to the user manual. Add in some dragon bowls in three sizes from the local oriental market and a couple of pairs of chopsticks, and clearly all that’s lacking is a variety of types of rice—which I added. Okay, maybe that’s not all that’s lacking, but my budget ran out before I could add a rice cooker cookbook. The sheer volume of stuff seems a little crazy, considering that she’ll have to take/mail the stuff back to Texas, but I definitely had fun, and I think that overall she’ll be blessed by it.