It's Almost Party Time

I invited my 14-year-old niece to spend the night with us Friday night (or tonight if you are reading this on Friday). It's about time I got to know her better. I generally only see her at family events and she is not always at those because sometimes she is with her dad. I had also thought of doing some sort of "Happy Anniversary" thing in Hawaiian and then thought, "Hey! That's something cool we can do together!" I went to Michael's and thanks to a VERY helpful boy (Yo, Chris W., You Rock!) found these:
I also bought a dark green foam poster board for to put these on. (hee hee) Anyway I separated the letters from the flowers so I could spell this out:

I had to play with the contrast so you could read that, because they are just sitting on a clear plastic tray right now on top of the "party cloth." The weird thing was, when I dumped out the stuff to separate the flowers from the letters, I experienced the Clown Car Phenomenon. I ended up with enough flowers to half fill this very large shoebox:

I put the letters back in the orignal container and they took up almost a third of the space. I can't figure out how it all fit in there to begin with.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to having some quality time with my niece and getting to know her on a more personal level. Her mother and grandmother have both told me how excited she is about it. She has only one other aunt that lives in Colorado and I don't think they know each other very well. She's also going to help us with other party related matters and help me decorate. What I didn't tell my niece is that she has to watch my favorite movie with me. I know her mother doesn't like old movies, so I'm pretty sure she hasn't seen it, but I'd like to think that next week sometime, she will be humming "The Boy Next Door" or singing "Clang, clang clang goes the trolley!"

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And now for a totally unrelated subject complete with no segue whatsoever: Lily, the cat that can disappear, disappeared tonight and I always enjoy trying to find her. Sometimes I can't and give up and sometimes I get frustrated and shake a bag of treats to make her reappear. But that's cheating. Tonight after going over the house three times I found her here: