Hopefully my patience meter has refilled after wrangling with Yosemite last evening.

The Saturday after the Atlanta Cheese Festival was niece Brooke's 8th birthday so into a gaggle of giggling, shrieking children we descended.  We got her the American Girl Doll of The Year and a real  Pandora charm for her bracelet, Elsa's dress from Frozen.  The charm came from Jared and I think she was quite pleased to have the Jared bag,  Jared tissue and Jared gift-wrap - quite the grownup present.

Sunday was errands, as Saturday is the usual errand day at The Hellhole but we'd been busy elsewhere.  There were extra errands to handle because the next weekend, Brooke's mom/one of my besties, Tammy, had a milestone birthday and I was helping her husband Matt throw the party.  I did a cheese board - I have this great cheese serving board that looks like the top of a wine cask - assorted cracker basket with these cute, tiny cracker tongs I bought for Alan's birthday party last year, crudite and dip, two different hot cheese-based Mexican dips with an assortment of chips, since the main attraction was a taco bar, a large bowl of assorted fresh-cut fruit and of course little smokies.  Like Matt's Uncle Lyle remarked, "It's not really a Southern party without the little smokies!"  Hmm...it seems like I did more things than that, but that's all I recall.  I ordered the cake, which Matt picked up, and a big floral arrangement featuring lavender colored roses.  Oh!  I had a bunch of dishes of candy sitting around and made a lollipop tree out of purple lollipops with hot pink 'T's on them.

This was her cake:

Someone asked if I'd made it.

Yes, of course I did.  

I'm a pretty good cook and make a mean red velvet cake, but really, all that fondant artistry would be beyond me even after a year's worth of lessons.

I don't need fondant artistry lessons, though, because I know the way to Rhodes.  They did the cakes for our wedding and Alan's big birthday cake last year.

So I was pretty busy shopping and prepping, then with the party itself and recovery therefrom.  The party was on Sunday and I took the following Monday off work.  While we'd been at Michael's getting florist foam for me to make the lollipop tree, Alan bought me these great adult coloring books

and a large box of colored pencils.  I was looking forward to relaxing and doing a picture or two, which I did, and it was fun, but check this out.

He bought me a box of 48 Staedtler pencils and I unearthed a box of 48 Prang pencils from a project some years ago, so I had 96 colored pencils from which to choose, and used many different ones.

But looking at this, doesn't it look like I own something like 5 different crayons?

The color palette wasn't as vibrant as I'd hoped.  It doesn't matter, I suppose - it's not like the thing's going to be hanging in the Guggenheim once I'm done, and I'm having fun which is the entire point - but still, with 96 different pencils, I'd hoped for more variety/contrast.

< - - - more than 5 crayons

I also put fall gel-clings on our garage door.  We don't decorate for the holidays, exactly, but the last few winters, I've put blue and white snowflake gels on the windows of the garage door.  This year Alan bought me some for autumn.