Happy 39th to me!

Another year, another birthday, which to some appeared to be my 39th birthday. A customer who saw my bday decorations at work asked if I was turning 39, as if he was being kind and generous in his guess. When I looked incredulously at him he guessed '38??'. Um no, 37 - thanks. Then my ever considerate co-worker, Tony, told him 'yeah, she didn't age well...'. Thankfully the day did get better thanks to my pain in the ass co-workers who, for just that one day, acted like they liked me. They even took me out to Ikkyu, my favorite P-town Japanese restaurant, for lunch. I appreciated the effort even if I am convinced it was done out of fear. I'm used to it, I tend to have that effect on people. 

And for my birthday cake? Pumpkin cheesecake with shaved white chocolate from Upper Crust Bakery! My piggy co-workers ate that sh*t up, so I didn't have any to bring home. :(

For my birthday dinner I chose Leon Bistro, where we take our cooking class, because it doesn't get much better than their calamari steak. 

I got so many wonderful and thoughtful gifts I'll be enjoying for months. So, my work birthday party was on Thursday since we're not open on Fridays, my actual birthday was on Friday which consisted of a lunch date with a co-worker and my dinner at Leon Bistro, and then on Sunday two of my girlfriends took me out for day two of the Sierra Oro Farm Trail. You have a passport with the names of 29 participating wineries and specialty farms in Butte County that you travel to for food and wine samples. The girls had taken their hubbies on Saturday to places in Oroville so we did some of the Chico stops on Sunday. 

We did Odyssey Winery (where I bought an ahhh-mazing port) and Emerald C Winery that were off of upper Cohasset, north of my house towards the airport. On our way up we stopped at the airport complex for Mooney Farms which makes the Bella Sun Luci brand of sun dried tomatoes. They had sun dried tomato risotto, pasta with their brand pasta sauce, cold antipasto salad, warm sun dried tomato artichoke dip, two different tomato spreads, and a shop where you could buy their products direct for a steal! While up on the north end of town we popped across Hwy 99 and went to Roney Winery, a small operation which only sells direct. Our final stop was their gift to me, HoneyRun Winery, because nobody but me likes their stuff. It's sweeeeet fruit honey wine (mead). So, if you don't like dessert wine, you won't like their honey wine. I love it though - their blackberry honeywine is my favorite. Those five stops alone took us 6 hours, so how anybody could complete the 29 passport stops in two days is beyond me! But after seeing how reasonable the prices are ($25/person and you get a free wine glass) we're definitely thinking about doing it next year. So far "39" is starting off pretty good...