Happy Birthday, LL!

Today is Lloyd's birthday!! He is working all day today and he's on call all night, so there is no way to know when he will be done. So we've done a little birthday celebration all week. On Sunday, we celebrated with LL's family. I made a fabulous and fabulously bad for you Caramel Cake, from Martha Foose's cookbook. It is a wonderful Southern cookbook we got during our Viking Cooking Weekend in Mississippi. Anyway, he loves this caramel cake, but the icing is pretty involved, so I don't make it very often. And since it contains 8 eggs and 4 sticks of butter (and 2 more sticks of butter in the icing) it's certainly not going to win any health awards! LOL. He loved it, though, and so did the rest of the family. I actually don't have pictures of the Sunday celebration, because they are still on my SIL's camera, but I will get them.

Yesterday LL and I had a date night. Thank you so much to my SIL Taryn for watching Collette! We went to a dinner sponsored by the Bucknell Alumni association (LL got his Master's there). It was a great meal, and we heard a really talented a capella group on campus, Beyond Unison. They do a lot of contemporary songs and are wonderful.... (as soon as they started singing I turned to LL and said, "I totally feel like I'm watching Glee right now"! Haha!) They have one CD out and another one will be out later this month. They are worth checking out; we want to get the CD. It was a really fun night.

Earlier that day I had borrowed my BIL Andy's truck to go get LL's birthday present. My parents, Grandpa and I decided to get him a nice grill, since our other grill had bit the dust. When we came home from the dinner and picked up Collette, I asked LL to drop me off at the farm, and I would get home on my own. He was suspicious but agreed. So I got the truck and brought it home, and asked him to come outside to see his present. It's hard to hide a grill (and I couldn't lift it off the truck anyway) and since he was working all day today, I figured he could get it a few hours early. Here he is checking out his birthday present:

Today I made him some Paula Deen cupcakes to take into work as a treat. He was working out of the office on large animal calls all morning, so I made them today and he took them in this evening for small animal office hours. The cupcakes are incredible, if I do say so myself. :o) Chocolate Cupcakes with Coffee Cream Filling and Coffee Butter cream Icing. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Love me some Paula!! Here is one of the cupcakes:

Tonight we hope to christen the grill if LL isn't working until midnight. :o) The plan is to have some Surf n' Turf! Happy Birthday, LL!