A New Tea Venue and A Birthday Gift

While scrolling through Facebook a few days ago, I came across a new tea venue in the nearby city of Troy.  Tea venues seem to be closing these days instead of opening, so I was excited to see their Facebook ad.  For local readers the venue is called Fox and Hounds Pastry Den.  It appears to be more of a coffee shop and bakery than tearoom but they do serve Afternoon Tea by reservation.  I'm anxious to check it out and will report back.

[Photo from their Website]

On another subject, my son, Steve, celebrated a birthday yesterday.  We will be celebrating tomorrow and I wanted to share a unique gift wrapping idea I saw online.  We always give him money [to feed his baseball card collecting hobby], but this way of giving money is much nicer than just putting money inside a card.

I ordered a shadowbox picture frame from Amazon and asked my daughter-in-law what Steve's two favorite candies are.  Fortunately it's Halloween time so the miniature candy bars were readily available.

~ The finished project ~

Pastor Appreciation is the month of October and since Steve is our Pastor, we always give him money for that too.  Thanks to my neighbor I became aware of replicas of the Ark of the Covenant, and thought he would appreciate one in addition to a monetary gift.  Amazon had several choices to choose from and this is the one I got.  I love that it has the three elements that were in the original Ark of the Covenant recorded in the Bible - Manna, the 10 Commandments and Aaron's budding staff.

Lastly, do any of you have AOL as your e-mail provider?   I've had AOL for years and it's always been easy to send photos from my phone to myself in an e-mail and open them on my desktop.  Then I download them to my harddrive so I can insert them in blog posts.  WELL... I got a notification that AOL has made some changes [supposedly improved upgrades] and the procedure I used to use doesn't work anymore.  I spent considerable time this morning trying to figure out a way to get these photos from my phone to my desktop.  Not sure exactly what I did to finally get them but it's going to be a nightmare to retrieve photos from my phone to my desktop going forward unless someone who's more tech savvy than me can explain how to do it.  Why are they always changing things that worked perfectly!!!