January the 10th has been my birthday for 25 years. It is a special day for me. I share my birthday with my Uncle Dave, Rod Stewart and George Foreman. Growing up there have always been some birthday traditions and memories that are important ot me. An angel food cake, an old, metallic, “Happy Birthday Rebecca” sign from Judy Mingus (which has not aged as well as I), being serenaded at breakfast by Dad singing, Sixteen Candles, and being wisked off to Portland, ME for my 24th by Peter. Good times, good times.

“But why?” you may ask, “are you bringing this up now, on the 19th of February?” That is a great question. And I have a great answer.

In addition to those mentioned earlier, I also share a birthday with Charlie Clough. He sits behind my parents in church, tells jokes before the service, taught my pre-school sunday school class AND for the past 13 years or so, has taken me out to dinner on our birthday.

The 58 years that separate us have never been a problem. I talk about school (middle, high, college and grad) and he tells stories from his rebellious teenage years (those poor teachers!) and from his time in the South Pacific fighting in World War Two.

Every year we eat at the “Riverside Resturaunt” in Brookline, New Hampshire. All the waitresses know Charlie and they recognize me…and the place has been the same for years and years. If you go there on your birthday they’ll put a sparkler in your dessert, get you to wear a funny crown and take your picture. I have a collection of Polaroids commemorating each year.

This year we diverged from tradition. Anyone who may have been in the Massachusetts area the first couple weeks of January will remember that it was bitterly, bone chillingly cold. Way to cold to bundle up and go to dinner even further north in NH. So we postponed until this afternoon and went for lunch instead.

We had a little scare having just heard that the Riverside had just been sold. Would they still be open? Yes! Phew! We walked in and were in for a bit of a shock. What had once been a cute country resturaunt chock-a-block full of antiques and knick knacks was now stripped down to the bare bones. We could actually see the walls and ceiling! {All, or most, will be sold at auction on March 6th at the Brookline Auction House aka. the Tin Can}

As fortune would have it, the food was just the same and we were treated to the yearly sparkler and photo. Here’s to 2005!

On Saturday, Becky and I drove down to Hyannis to visit our friends Jeremy and Angela. They are getting married on March 6, so we helped them out with some wedding preparations while we were down there. We also had a very good dinner of pepperoni pasta and caesar salad. As usual, I had the camera with me, so there were ***some photos|http://gallery.prwdot.org/hyannis*** taken as well, including a couple nice photos of Jeremy’s cat Georgia, and some ***really cool shots of sunset|http://gallery.prwdot.org/hyannis_sunset*** over the Cape (Jeremy and I went on a little photography expedition while the girls were working on some crafty things).

As for the Wood family, life continues mostly as normal with one notable glitch in recent days. Because of a problem with ***NAC|http://www.nac.net/***, which is ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/***’s network provider, Site5’s mail servers were among a list of other servers added to the ***SPEWS|http://www.spews.org/*** database. This database is used by some (but not many) ISP’s to determine if incoming mail is from a known spammer. Apparently, some of NAC’s customers were marked as spammers, and as a result, SPEWS added most, if not all, of NAC’s customers to its blacklist — whether or not they actually sent spam.

Because of this, we may have trouble sending email to some of our friends, family, colleagues, and others… some of you may have already received a test message, and we appreciate your replies as we try to determine the extent of the effects of this blacklisting. If you have received a test message from us, and have not yet replied, please do so.

The only solution for this problem is for NAC to terminate the accounts of its customers who are guilty of sending spam. That does seem to be working, so hopefully our email will be healthy again. In the meantime, if you receive email from either of us from an unusual address, don’t be alarmed. And if you’ve been expecting an email from us, but haven’t received it yet, it might be good to check with us to see whether it’s been sent.

If any of you have surfed on over to the blogs listed to the right you may have seen the ***website of Michelle.|http://mikao.blogspot.com*** A few weeks ago she started “Project Mail-a-Thon” which I gleefully took part in. The details are as follows:

qqq| *The ***original instructions|http://mikao.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_mikao_archive.html#106460371587482857*** from Michelle’s site*

i have decided to start a live internet/real life project. i call this project mail-a-thon quite simply because i cannot think of a better name for it, and i think it’ll stick. it’s catchy, huh?

this is a project that, on a global scale, could bring much happiness to many mailboxes. while “real mail” is more expensive that e-mail, it is, for the most part, infinitely cooler. and, seriously, a stamp doesn’t cost that much.

so, to participate, this is what you need to do:

1. leave a comment saying something to the effect that “wow, this sounds neato. i want to participate!”

2. email me your snail mail address, to rebecca at prwdot dot org. this is an essential part of the plan, don’t forget it.

3. i will mail you something cool within one week of recieving your address. this cool thing will be a surprise. the object of the mail-a-thon is to send happiness. yes, happiness. how cool. you will also, at this time (within one week), also mail me some happiness. i would like that. i like mail. i like happiness

4. when you recieve your happiness in the mail, you must post an entry on your blog that reports your happiness, has a link-back to http://prwdot.org, and post these instructions. {If you do not have a blog comment back on this site to let me know what you think!}

5. you will mail happiness to others who request that you do so via your blog.

but, you may still be left with one question… how exactly do i mail someone happiness? well dears, that is going to have to be something you figure out. i am guessing it will be distinctive to each person.|qqq

So, I sent off a little letter to Miss Michelle and was quite happy to have received a postcard from her this week. It is a handmade postcard with flowers and my name in pretty letters across the front. It definately made me smile…which was the whole purpose of the game!

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PARTICIPATE just email me your snail mail address and I’ll give you mine and we’ll start the ball rolling!

i have a friend. she lives in Florida. yup. she hasn’t called me in a looooooong time. but today, for the third time, her phone called me. i was treated to a serenade of what sounded like the “Macarena” presumably from her car radio. then i hung up. the marvels of modern technology!

I was lucky enough to get to spend a large part of the weekend with miss jennifer. We left early Friday morning for the Island and packed the day full of ferry rides, lunch with an ocean view, sunning at Town Beach, swimming in the salty sea, yummy dinner and FIREWORKS! what fun.

And Saturday I ushered Jennifer into the world of blogging. She’s catching on quickly. Check out her infant blog ***in its new home|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com***. We’ve also added her to our link list. Happy surfing!

Jennifer visited us this weekend. We went to the science museum on Friday night and spent Saturday being crafty.

There are pictures of us making paper here along with pictures of my newly finished Quilt. (an extreemly late wedding present for Mrs. Joanna Trautman)

We just got back from Chris and Naomi’s wedding, and boy are our feet tired! There was much dancing to be had at their reception. Naturally, I had my camera with me, and I had planned to put all the photos online tonight after we got back. But we decided to just turn in, instead. The pictures will be online some time on Sunday… I might get a chance to upload them in the afternoon, in between church and the Celtics game we got last minute tickets to see. 🙂

hello jill. this is for you.

a nice face

Yesterday Peter and I spent the evening with Jeremy and Angela, Some good friends of ours.

First we took the Red Line into Harvard Square and took a brisk walk to The Garage mall on JFK Avenue. Inside the Garage is a great little Vietnamese Restaurant called Pho Pasteur. YUM.

After dinner a quick stop at Ben and Jerry’s and then back on the Red Line to Alewife. We drove back home and settled in for an evening of watching “The Count of Monte Cristo” with our new little home theater system.

A very fun evening with very fun people. 🙂