Friday's Fave Five # 18

Happy New Year everybody and welcome back to Friday's Fave Five. If you're new, we're so glad you joined us! You can go here for details. Don't forget to sign on to Mr. Linky if you've done a post on your fave things from the week!

So to start the first Fave Five of 2009 it's going to be:

1. A quiet New Year's Day spent lazing around the house and just reading and blogging. I love the Christmas season but boy oh boy, was I looking forward to New Year's Day where I could just be. And that's exactly how it went. Stayed in my jammies until 11 a.m. and made a yummy relaxed brunch of berries pancakes and bacon. Then curled up with coffee and my laptop and book. I totally ignored the Christmas decorations screaming at me to put them away and just relaxed. It was much needed and I'm totally refreshed and ready to do all the post Christmas de-decorating and cleaning now.

2. Christmas and holiday blends of coffees. I actually recieved three different kinds for Christmas gifts so it was fun trying out the different kinds of coffees over the week. My favorite was the Starbucks Christmas Blend. Unfortunately, it's all gone now. Oh, well, there's always next year. :v)

3. Appetizers for supper a couple times this week. We recieved a couple of really large, really nice food baskets as gifts and it's been fun just noshing out on all the specialty foods that were in them that we normally wouldn't buy. Wonderful stuff like sausages, cheeses, olives, crackers, pates and spreads. Not something we do all the time, but fun once in awhile.

4. My birthday was just a wonderful day. Even though I worked, it was very relaxed. Hubby worked on getting my bookshelves up and I can hardly wait to get my books into my very own "library". Then we enjoyed a lovely dinner out at a fancy, schmancy steak restaurant in town, one that overlooks the whole city. So nice. I would have taken a picture of my dinner but my family was aghast that I would even though I told them any good little blogger worth their weight in posts would put up a picture of what they ate for dinner. They didn't buy it. Alas, you'll just have to use your imagination and picture appetizers of mushroom caps stuffed with cream cheese, shrimp and crab, a dinner of New York Strip Loin with wine sauteed mushroom, stuffed potato and a roasted veggie assortment of brocolli, acorn squash and carrots on a white plate and dessert of 3 layer chocolate cake (which we all shared).

5. And saving the best for last was spending time with my beautiful girl, Kay. She spent lots of time at home over the last week, just hanging out with us. I really appreciated that as I know her friends were really pulling on her to do things. It was so nice just to sit and watch Amazing Race and parts of So You Think You Can Dance with her which is something we did together before she left for school. She doesn't have tv so I recorded the season for her and she did a marathon of it. I didn't sit through the whole thing but was able to join her for a lot of it. We read together, chatted, and just spent lots of time. It was so nice to have her here to help celebrate my birthday. It was again very hard to say goodbye when she had to back, so now I'm counting the days to Easter but I think I'll try to talk hubby into a little road trip before then. :v)

So do you have favorites from your last week? Do up a post and let us know. It's so refreshing to read all the good things about our days.