Happy Friday!

Yay!! My "baby" sister just arrived in Boston (up from Pittsburgh) for the weekend. We'll be seeing her later tonight - woohoo! She's going to babysit tomorrow night so that A and I can finally go on our date that was planned for 6 months ago! We're going to dinner at Smith & Wollensky. I even made a hair appointment and bought a new outfit for our big date - that includes a SKIRT! That's two skirts I have purchased in the last month. This is history in the making. (I only own one other skirt, and that one goes down to my ankles - it's so long that I can actually wear long/thermal underwear under it and no one can tell. So it's not exactly reeking of femininity.)

And, tonight, our friends are taking me out for dinner at a nearby Japanese steakhouse. I think R will enjoy seeing the chefs with their fancy knife tricks. Hopefully, that will also entice him to eat. (Although we're bringing a back-up sandwich just in case.)

On Sunday, we're planning to go canoeing on the Concord River. It's supposed to be a beautiful sunny, cool, fall day so I can't wait.

All of this is because ... I'm turning 35!!!

I'm actually excited about it. Well, until I got an email from HR at work telling me that my life insurance rates are going up because I'm now entering a new age bracket. LOL.

Happy weekend, everyone!

P.S. NoVA Dad introduced me to the sermons of Frederick Buechner awhile ago, and I'm so grateful. This passage from Buechner's sermon called "Hope" really spoke to my heart this morning [italics/emphasis mine]:

I think it is hope that lies at our hearts and hope that finally brings us all here. Hope that in spite of all the devastating evidence to the contrary, the ground we stand on is holy ground because Christ walked here and walks here still. Hope that we are known, each one of us, by name, and that out of the burning moments of our lives he will call us by our names to the lives he would have us live and the selves he would have us become. Hope that into the secret grief and pain and bewilderment of each of us and of our world he will come at last to heal and to save."