Birthday goodies

Tuesday was my birthday, as my dear cousin Keli pointed out in her well wishes that she left in the comments on the July 4th post. It's ended up being more of a birthday week! It's pretty fabulous to have a whole week of celebrating, don't you think?

And to make it easy for me to remember, my friend Jennifer had her baby on the 7th as well! I thought it was very considerate of her, don't you? She's the baby who received the cutest bunny ever quilt and I can't wait to meet her!

I happen to have the best boss and coworkers. They make it fun to go to work everyday. And they really get into the birthdays every month. I got roses, cards, cookies, cheesecake, 2 lunches. I just had to share part of what my boss got me:

How great is this? It's a Twinkie shaped pan and cookbook! I had mentioned a story I heard on NPR a couple of months ago about a restaurant in California known for it's chocolate Twinkie w/espresso cream dessert and lamented the fact that I had not bought the Twinkies pan from Williams Sonoma several years back when they had it. I find it hard to pass up a shaped cake pan of any kind but somehow managed to resist the Twinkie pan, and now I totally regretted it. After our discussion, my boss went online and low and behold found not only a Twinkie pan, but a Twinkie cookbook! Isn't she thoughtful? The card was great. Her son made it for me and wrote and signed it for her then put a p.s. saying he made the card. I totally love it.
The cookbook is awesome. Check out some of the recipes:Ok, so the Twinkies and Meat thing is really just wrong, but DiscoJen thought the Twinkies and breakfast sausages looked like it could be good.
One of my coworkers travels overseas quite often and is sweet enough to bring me back fabric from the countries he visits. This time he went to a couple of our offices in Singapore and Malaysia and brought me back fabric that

one of our coworkers in Singapore bought for me. She got me enough of the yellow bird fabric to make a skirt. She used my very tolerant friend as the model to wrap the fabric around to be sure she got enough. I so wish I had a photo of this. He's retired military, and I think it's absolutely hysterical that she used him for a skirt model. Aren't the fabrics gorgeous? I absolutely adore fabrics from around the world that represent the culture where they are from.

He also brought me this shirt from our Malaysian office:

He said that if I didn't want to wear the shirt, I could always make it into a bag. It's a pretty awesome pattern, don't you think?

And my friend from our China office sent over the most stunning silk fabric to coordinate with the silk she brought me when she visited last fall. I'll take pictures of that tomorrow.

I'll continue w/the birthday celebration and works in progress as well as finished this week tomorrow. The hubby is taking me out for Tapas tonight for my birthday. I must say, I'm really enjoying the birthday week concept.