Birthday and other annual events

For my birthday I gave myself the gift of a massage, aurora chasing, a cooking class, my annual haircut and two nights at home my my fella. I’m tired but inspired and now I _need_ a food processor!
Aurora chasing on my birthday.  

I planned to meet a friend who goes out frequently aurora chasing, has a really nice camera and takes wicked awesome aurora photos on a regular basis, but I was really just wanting to tag along so I would not be out by myself in the dark.  The hubby always say “please take a buddy” and I do try to respect those wishes!  She invited me to bring my camera since I take so many pictures and have taken some fairly dark and obscure photos of the aurora from my house downtown,  as well as a tripod, just to see if we could get something more out of my camera.  It’s a point a click waterproof/drop-proof/Joyce-proof kind of digital camera so I really didn’t have much hope, but I brought it anyway since she is the expert and maybe she had some tricks up her sleeve she could share.  As it turns out, there just was not much we could do, so I  had a nice time chatting with her and a couple of friends that had come out to photograph the aurora, even though I could not see anyone.

The aurora was lighting up early and putting on quite the show as I was driving out to Chena Lakes, but quickly died down and was giving us some bands and green haze, but not a lot of spectacular sights, so around 1:00am I decided I should go home since I had plans to be at a cooking class at 10:00am the next morning.

As luck would have itl, on the way home the lights started up again straight overhead. I pulled over and got few shots, even a selfie! It’s grainy, but I have my birthday aurora photo! If you want to see some of the gorgeous  photos that my friend took, check out her facebook page and this is s photo from the night I was with her (taken after I left) 

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Cooking class

The day after my birthday, that is Saturday morning, I took a cooking class called “Stellar Super Sauces Class Taught ” taught by Phyllis Morrow at Breadline, Inc.’s Stone Soup Cafe.  I had no idea what I was going into and I’m not a stellar cook, but it touted that the sauces could be made “vegan, vegetarian or paleo” so I wanted to check it out.  I went in thinking maybe I was going to learn to make cashew alfredo sauce and that would would be also be helping with the cooking, but instead we got to sit and watch Phyllis make us not four, but five sauces using primarily a food processor.

Except for the aoili which had duck egg in it, I tried all of them and liked them.  I was even planning on how to make two of the sauces right away, the Bazha with beets (the red one) for a curry side dish and the green pumpkin seed mole (the green one) as a topping for fish and veggies.   And I decided I needed a food processor before the class was even over!

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“Taming the Wookie”

It’s funny how one does not realize just how wild and out of control their hair is until after they finally get that annual haircut.

Maybe this should become more of a semi-annual event!  (* “Taming the Wookie” was a comment on my facebook page that a friend made in reference to the “before” photo.  I found this to be real-life laugh out loud funny!)
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