Big Birthday Blog Hop

Today I'm joining in the celebration of our friend Jo's birthday:  the big Five-Oh.  Jo's blog, in case you don't know, is Serendipitous Stitching.  She has assigned each of the 50 blog hop participants a different year, picked from the last 50 of course, and my year is...

2006

Here's what happened to Jo then:

Jo was 40.  Life Begins!  Jo and her new partner continued to work together and bought a house together too.  Jo celebrated her 40th Birthday with a big party at their music venue and even got dragged on stage by her cousins to sing a song with the band.  Actually the cousins sang and Jo played tambourine!  Jo's son (not yet known as The Large Boy because he was only little) started Nursery at the local Primary School and Jo joined the PTA helping run the raffle at the Christmas Fayre.

Now I'm supposed to tell you either what I was doing when I was 40 (that was quite a while ago--my memory is hazy) or what I was doing in 2006.  Well, 2006 wasn't quite the banner year for me as it was for Jo, but here goes...

In 2003, the company that I worked for had moved from their nice commuter-friendly location in downtown Chicago to Warrenville, which meant a nightmare 43-mile (one-way) commute for me, peppered with construction delays for the entire time that I stuck it out there.  To make matters worse, office politics was making my job unpleasant, to say the least.  I was working a 9-hour day, and had to leave for work at 5:20 in the morning and didn't get home until about 12 hours later.  Needless to say, there was not too much stitching, reading, or anything else happening on a weekday evening except watching mindless TV and going to bed early.  I had already decided that I was going to take early retirement in March 2007, so when Jo told me that 2006 was my year, at first all I could think of was that it was just one big countdown to the following year.

But, it wasn't all bad.  The daughter of a good friend got married in Seattle that year, so we got to visit Washington state for the first time, and do a little sightseeing, too.

 Mt. Rainier

And the happy couple just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary!

I started taking Spanish classes on Saturday mornings,

and the instructor was fun and engaging.

I did manage to do a little stitching in 2006

(otherwise I would have gone totally insane),

and this tiny guy on 40-count mesh was completed.

And speaking of dogs, we had two at the time...

Beulah and Timmy, a couple of cutie-pies.

Lastly, Jo asked the Blog Hop participants

to post a photo of something that we've stitched

that we think she would like.

I know she's fond of Halloween,

so here is my tree full of spooky ornaments.

Happy birthday and feliz cumpleanos, Jo!