Whirlwind birthday week

This past week was all about Nicole's 40th birthday and the preparations for it. She had decided to invite our colleagues to a birthday lunch buffet and we spent a lot of time planning and preparing it. In the end it was all worth it, everybody loved it and Nicole had a great time, even proclaiming it her best birthday ever! 
The buffet was a bit of a hybrid mix between what we would usually serve up back home in a buffet with a few English buffet staples thrown in.
On one side we had a mix of home-baked and shop-bought breads, then soup, soft drinks, wine, beer from our hometown (all not visible on these photos), various salads, meat balls, cheese, cold meats, pickles, vegetable sticks, various dips (e.g. salsa, salmon and cream cheese, etc), quiches, eggs:


I loved this side of the buffet with lots of snacks and sweet things. We had a selection of crisps and other savoury snacks, various varieties of Haribo (brought back with us when we last were in Germany), German jelly flavours, yoghurts, fruit and cakes:

There are always quite a few dietary requirements to take into account when bringing food into work (well, we don't have to - but it's a bit silly to go to the effort of preparing food for everybody - instead of just going to the supermarket and buying a few boxes - without trying to ensure that there's something for everybody), so we had vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, pork-free and non-alcoholic options, as well as a selection of Dukan diet friendly dishes.
Since this is all about Nicole's birthday, there also needs to be a picture of the birthday girl on her big day:



There wasn't any scrapping time over the last week but things started to calm down yesterday. We had our monthly crop and I managed to complete week 2 of Project Life, as well as another 4 pages of my December Daily/Journal Your Christmas album. I'm still quite behind on the album with another 18 pages to go but I really hope to get it done this month. After all all of the pages are half-done already and just need some assembly and finishing touches (which takes me between 30 and 90 minutes for each of them, madness!). To be honest, though, I find myself struggling with it a bit this year; I find it very hard to get motivated to sit down and work on these pages, as much as I will probably enjoy the finished product. I think it's a mix of wanting to work on other things as well and never really having fallen in love with the paper collection I'm using. Anyhow, off to bake another cake for Nicole's birthday celebration with friends tomorrow evening!