I received a very nice Mother's Day surprise :)

...actually more than one.

First a beautiful bouquet from my oldest son. He came home yesterday, which in itself was a gift because he has been away for about 6 weeks. We all went out for lovely lunch yesterday at Longhorn Steak House, because he had to go back early today to work on a project and start studying for finals. Soon it will be all over and he'll be graduating May 25th. Tomorrow we are going to his college for an Honors Convocation as he is receiving an academic excellence award for outstanding academic achievement in Computer Engineering. He will be receiving B.S. degrees in both electrical and computer engineering, magna cum laude. He is in the 5 year masters program and hopefully will receive his Master's degree a year from now.We are VERY proud of him!!

The other surprise was discovering one Robin's egg in the nest outside my kitchen window. Since April 26th we have had a very industrious mother robin (I named her Mrs. Robinson) building a nest in the rhododendron bush. Here and there she stopped showing up to work on the nest and we feared the worst.This is a picture of the rhododendron with the nest:
My camera leaves a lot to be desired. The zoom is awful, but I did manage in Adobe photoshop to zoom in and crop a close-up picture of my new friend:
Today she acted differently, staying longer in the nest resting and not doing her usual nest grooming. Tried standing up on a chair to try and see inside the nest, but no luck. Then I had the brainstorm and went upstairs to my bedroom window. Low and behold there was one beautiful turquoise, robin's egg blue egg in the nest!! I was so "egg"cited :) I opened the window and stuck out my arm with the camera and tried to get a picture. This is what I ended up with:
Not good! Once again I used photoshop and ended up with a close up:
Can you see the blue egg? From what I have read robins lay one egg a day. I'll have to keep a close eye on the nest. How appropriate to find the egg on Mother's Day! I am very happy :) If you want to see a perfect picture of a robin's nest, check out Melody's blog under "I" for incubating .
The next thing was not a surprise, but I am very happy with it. Most of you know I've been crazily baking artisan bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. I did have a dilemma though. My bread slices were a bit to be desired. Ok, for eating with butter, but too uneven for sandwiches. I tried an electric knife as suggested by some of my blogging friends and that went well, very well....but the next time I tried the knife, it was dead as a door nail!! I must have burnt the motor out using it to cut through the crispy, crunchy crust. The knife was over twenty years old (...so back to the drawing board.) I splurged and ordered a Rival Folding Food Slicer:
Now this works great! We now have beautiful even slices and the best part - it fold up nicely to fit in my cabinet. I'm baking bread so often now that I really think it will pay for itself :)

No knitting to show you as I am still working on the top secret birthday present.
Hope everyone is enjoy the day....happy knitting :)