The Love of My Life turned 53 last week and he asked for his usual cake.  He wanted an angel food cake.  I made this one from scratch (but had a back up mix in case my egg white mojo decided to run out the back door). 

The homemade ones don't rise as high as the mix ones but they are more tender and have better flavor.  This was served with homemade whipped cream and chopped strawberries, raspberries and blackberries.  There was none left.

The girls and their men came over and when El got home from work, we ate sausage and meatball parm sandwiches with macaroni salad and played Zombie Dice.  It was fun.  I am not a very good zombie.  I got shot over and over and failed to collect any brains.  Kate and Patrick, however, made excellent zombies.  They collected many brains and hardly got shot at all.  It was a good time.

Last night, we had a full on thunderstorm. There was lightning and loud thunder and rain.  I had just gone to bed and the flash woke me up and then the thunder boomie made falling back to sleep a little difficult.    This is a sure sign that spring is coming in.  That and the green shoots that will soon be grape hyacinths and daffodils and tulips and hyacinths and croci.  As much as I love my handknit woolen outerwear, I look forward to washing it and putting it away. 

Pk and I had our day off today.  He made some sawdust in the garage and I finished clue number 2 in the mystery shawl kal.  I didn't pin it out since it's too big at this point on the needles and I don't like transferring it just to show it off.  I figure you can see the leaf motifs forming between the millions and millions of beads.  It takes me so long to do a beaded row.  I just resign myself to toodle along and I get done when I'm done.  I worked on this for about 7 hours today to finish it. 

And here you can get a good look at the beads.  I'm using two different but remarkably similar colors and I can't tell the difference.  They have gold lining and it picks up the light and reflects it in a pleasing manner.

I had so much trouble with clue 1 that I was aprehensive with this one but I flew through it with only minimal tinking to fix a stitch count.  It was reassuring. 

Pk has class tomorrow but I'm off again.  I am slowly regaining some energy and may spend some quality time with the spinning wheel.  I look forward to not feeling so tired all the time.  Several folks at work have said the same thing and when we went to the grocery store to get some sudafed for Pk, they were out of it.  Evidently, there's a lot of sinus congestion going around. 

I thought I'd also look through the Estonian Lace book I got for Christmas and see if anything in there struck my fancy.  I imagine it will be more of an eenie meenie miney moe.  There are a lot of beautiful patterns in there and I have some pale pink and some white merino/silk laceweight yarn that is yearning to be twisted into something beautiful.  I'm leaning toward Madli's shawl.  It's so beautiful. 

Tonight we're having some leftover meatballs and sausage over some pasta.  I just have to cook some spaghetti and make some garlic bread and dinner is done.  Easy, just the way I like it on a lazy day off.

I hope you all are having a good week!