A Delightful Birthday!

Despite a long and busy day at work, my birthday wound up being quite wonderful, in part due to all of the calls, texts, and messages I received from friends and family wishing me a happy day (I need to start doing this randomly for people on non-birthdays.  It's such a lovely pick-me-up!) and also in part due to S, who made it his personal mission to make sure I had the best day possible!  It started off with me waking up to him apologizing for not wrapping my gift.  I know I have a thing for wrapping gifts that I give, but I hardly get upset when people don't wrap mine (right mom? Mrs. "hold out your hands and close your eyes"....).  And I was definitely not bummed at all once I saw what he had gotten me!

My very own mint green Kitchenaid stand mixer!!!!  I can't wait to whip up some delicious foods with it!  I'm thinking I'll start with some pizza dough for homemade pizza!   It's so pretty!  We then had to head off to work.  During the course of the day I had multiple (some frustrating) meetings, met up with S to try to track down some of the elusive Saint Arnold's Divine Reserve 14 (we got 3 bottles!) and snag a mid-day kiss, got an award at work for helping on the team that supported the big ISS repair just before the holidays this past December, and then finally headed home to meet up with S!  At home, he surprised me with yet another (unwrapped) gift that I also love, a poster map of Chicago!

He spoils me!  We then headed into town for some art.  It turned out the Houston Art Museum was closed for reasons unknown to us (some sort of private event.  but no signs were posted that they'd be closed outside of the museum or on their website...) so we wandered the nearby sculpture garden and Contemporary Arts Museum instead.  We were a little bummed, though, since yesterday was our last day of membership at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.  Oh well.  After, we went out for a DELICIOUS dinner at Corner Table.  They have a varied menu of "New American" dishes, but they're especially known for their Paleo diet based menu.  We started off with their famous crab tower and it was amazing.

 

For our main meal, we both decided to try dishes from the Paleo menu.  I went with the Paleo Paella, which uses shredded cauliflower in place of the rice and while the texture was definitely different from a standard paella, the flavors were wonderful.  S got the Paleo Enchiladas, which were made with coconut flour tortillas (grains are a no-no in a paleo diet) and were absolutely phenomenal!  We're already planning on going back sometime to try other items from the menu that we were eyeing like their Paleo Fried Chicken and their impressive burger menu.  Not to mention their deserts, which we were too full to partake in this trip but we fully intend to take advantage of next time, especially since they had about 5 different vegan, aka egg-free, desert options that I could pick from!

After our yummy dinner we swung by HEB to pick up desert for later that night and then headed back to my place for some kitty snuggles and True Detective (our new tv/HBO obsession).  We ended our evening with some wine and beer and S singing me "Happy Birthday" over two candle-lit cannolis.  Overall a lovely day!