Yes, you may remember Danielle from an earlier post. Today is Danielle's birthday, so a big Happy Birthday to you! Danielle has been staying with us for the past month or so. She was traveling on her motorcycle from Vancouver on a trip similar to mine (but many more miles) and unfortunately, her bike broke down. Looks like a new bike is in the works, though, so that is fine news.
So this morning, Danielle decided she wanted her fantastic pancakes on her birthday.

I tell you, these are tasty pancakes. The first time she made them, she poured the batter in the pan, shook the pan to thin the cake out and I said, "Oh, they're crepes." To which she replied, "Yes, I am French." Pancakes will never be the same, these are sooo much better.
Happy Birthday, Danielle.
And now on to this past weekend's adventure to South Pasadena. We took the Gold Line train so there would be no worries about parking or traffic. We ended up having dinner at a rather odd place, a Grilled Cheese and Cereal Restaurant.

It's a strange thing to think that you can go into a restaurant and order a bowl of Cocoa Puffs or Fruit Loops. They also have grilled cheese sandwiches with Spam. Yes, Spam. This, I did not try. I'll leave Spam to my past. They did have little Cokes.

I swear Coke tastes better in these little bottles.
Danielle went with me and we walked around a bit; went into a few shops. One shop had a very fine shop cat:

This was a fun shop and in a minute, I will show you what I found.
But back to South Pasadena. Christmas lights had been put up and shops were playing the usual very awful Christmas music. But the lights were really beautiful in the Ginko trees:

We ended up at Buster's Coffee House:

A photo of the coffee and treats we enjoyed:
A really fine time.
So now, I will show you some of the odd things I bought at Zinnia, the shop in South Pasadena.
Here are some charms and odd things:

Then, there's the creepy little, hairless dollheads:

A little strange, aren't they? Well, I do have plans. Of course, I do.
But this is the real kicker:

Imagine, this is a photo that was taken from someone's photo album. It is comical, disturbing and downright sinister. So naturally, I bought it. Not sure what I am going to do with it, maybe just look at it from time to time. There are so many captions that fit this picture, such as "I think I really screwed up this time (said by the baby)." What I wonder, since it obviously was torn from a photo album (the tell-tale pieces of black paper were on the back) what the rest of the photo album must have been like. I would have liked to take a look at that.
Sunday evening, we had a very nice storm. Wind, rain, thunder and lightning. When I got up Monday morning and went for my walk, it had recently stopped and everything was glistening and fresh.
And I will end this post with a photo from Monday's walk:

I hope everyone is having a great week!