On Thursday, I finally got to celebrate my birthday at work. With so many people on vacation and an unclear schedule this week on my part, the co-worker responsible for my celebration (the last one to have a birthday) and I decided that it would be safe to do it on Thursday once the kids were back in school. Normally work birthday celebrations involve a box of bagels or donuts, or store-bought cupcakes or cookies. Once in a while it's something from a nice bakery, or we even had ice cream pops once this summer. The birthday person gets a card signed by everyone, and we stand around and chat for 20 minutes. My birthday planner was the department admin, and she's a fun cougar-ish type woman infamous for not liking hugs. She's great, but just sort of matter-of-fact-ish, which we all love about her. So imagine my surprise when she baked actual homemade cupcakes for me, complete with homemade buttercream frosting!
They were so good! In fact, I had two!
On Friday morning, Carter and I went out to walk to the bus stop, and I notice that my coneflowers were now full of goldfinches. They must like the flowers now that they've gone to seed. Well, they all flew away as Carter and I walked down the driveway--all except this guy.
I didn't bring my phone with me so I couldn't take a picture as we walked. But guess who was still sitting in the same spot when we came back? I double checked to make sure it was still alive, because I'm not sure I've ever seen a bird sit somewhere that long. I could see it moving, so it was fine, although I'm convinced something is wrong with it. Maybe fat finch disease, but hopefully not. I even got about six feet away to take this picture, and it still didn't move, which is a possible symptom. Anyway, I pulled out of the driveway with it still sitting there. Funny little bird. Goldfinches always make me think of my grandma, because she loved birds and goldfinches were one of the first I could identify at her birdfeeders because of their color. They might also have been one of her favorites, if I recall correctly.
That night, I got stuck in traffic for extra long, which completely threw off my dinner plans. We ended up going out to Chick-fil-A, and despite some on-and-off drizzle, went downtown to High Falls. There was a ROC the Falls Summer Sendoff with food trucks and music overlooking the falls, followed by fireworks. Since we hadn't seen fireworks on the 4th of July or at any baseball games this summer, I thought it might be fun. Free parking and a nice walk across the Pont de Rennes Bridge sounded easy enough to me. Jacob, however, was not thrilled. In fact, he spent the entire time, literally every 30 seconds for the entire hour or so that we were there, either asking when we could leave or complaining that we were still there. It was SO obnoxious. I know he was annoyed because it was day one of his new NBA 2K20 game on Xbox, and after a long week he probably just wanted to sit there all night and play. And apparently he still doesn't like fireworks, though he's been seemingly fine with them for years, so who knows if that was legit or not. But he was super annoying the entire time we were there. Tween snark at its worst. Regardless, we wandered around. The falls looked pretty with their city backdrop and the cloudy night. I played around with my phone camera and real camera settings a bit, and with the lights on the falls and the change in angles as we walked, they constantly looked different.
Carter wanted ice cream and Craig found a food truck selling Nutty Buddies, which Carter ended up loving. We checked out the store at the Genesee Brewery and looked at some of the historical exhibits they had throughout.
As we were finishing up in the store, we heard the first couple booms. Once again I played with settings, and this was on my fireworks setting (which actually didn't work with the falls). But I liked how it captured the trail of the firework shooting up...
It certainly wasn't the best fireworks show ever, and nothing will ever beat when they used to project a laser show on the gorge walls here on weekends, but it was cool anyway.
Jacob was still annoyed and was practically dragging us out of there, as it was dripping rain again and he was insisting the fireworks were too loud and, yes, too bright. O-Kay. So we watched the last bit walking back across the bridge, barely able to keep up with him. Ugh. But at least I got some pretty pictures. Again, it's the little things! I may have been defeated on this round of forced family fun, but hey, at least we tried.
It's a cool, cloudy, not particularly exciting weekend, but hopefully we can make the best of it. Better than last night, anyway!
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