It's my birthday, give me coffee!

It was Mike's birthday today! Unfortunately, Tuesdays are the busiest days for our family so we didn't do much birthday celebration. After swim class, Jake and Mike went to the bento hut for dinners of salmon and halibut, so Mike had a nice birthday dinner with his boy. I was at my final photography class. More birthday stuff to come later this week/weekend... I'm looking forward to making a cake and generally stretching out the celebration!

I had my final photography class... a few weeks ago one of the class assignments was to photograph a place, to get the sense of the place. I took pictures of the Village Coffee in Multnomah Village, where Mike gets his coffee and is on a first-name basis with some of the baristas. The pictures turned out to be pretty cool! Then, for our final class assignment, we needed to produce some kind of finished product, which could be a framed photo, a scrapbook page, a photo album, etc. Those all sounded rather boring to me and I didn't have any particular pictures I'd taken lately that I wanted permanently displayed. But then I got to thinking about those coffee shop pictures. And the very next day Mike said to me "for my birthday I just want a new coffee cup -- my favorite one is worn out." Well that sealed the deal. I killed two birds with one stone, made a birthday present for Mike and did my final class assignment.

I used 3 of the pictures I took of the coffee shop and found a good coffee cup and arranged them on there.
Mike's Coffee! ahh...
Then I used contact paper to cover everything. Pretty cool, a personalized coffee cup for him!

In class, the photography teacher asked us to put our final projects on a particular table. So my coffee cup was sitting there with quite a few framed photos and a photo album. She looked at everything but totally overlooked my coffee cup until I pointed it out to her. Then she laughed and laughed and loved it. I don't think she's had a student do the assignment quite that way before!