Happy Birthday, Manford, and some other stuff

Hi. Greetings from down under, smaller country version. I have had a lovely birthday so far. We buy frozen croissants from a store here that sells French food; you set them out overnight to thaw and get bigger, cook them 18 minutes at 180 degrees C, and eat this wonderful concoction of flaky pastry and butter - yum! Emily made a little doll for me, Joseph gave me a DVD of the first year of The Office, British version, and Carrie got me a wonderful rain jacket - courtesy of Land's End and brought with them when the family from Kansas visited - many thanks to them, and a neat book about a New Zealander who spent three years in Japan as an English teacher, and the gang gave me a new Kaleidoscope (sp?) to add to the collection my dad started years ago. It has abalone shells in it - a real kiwi product. I found a chocolate cake with caramel icing - my favorite since childhood -at a local Cheesecake Factory. That fit in with my thinking earlier today of what some of my favourite things are, so here is a little list: favourite painters, Rembrandt, VanGogh, most other impressionists, Georgia O'keeffe, Vermeer, Winslow Homer, Renoir. Favourite museums, no ranking, The Louvre, what used to be called the Orangarie but now has another name with a large collection of Impressionist paintings, in Paris, The Kemper in Kansas City, The Prado, the entire Smithsonian collection, the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, The Phillips Collection in DC, the Met and MOMA in New York, the big and small museums in Wellington, NZ, the Art Institute in Chicago, the main one in Berlin (it has Rembrandt's Man with a Golden Helmet and a lovely bust of Nefertiti), the maratime museum in Barcelona (many wonderful ship models, with some in cross section). So, enough for now - would be interested in others' favourites or favorites. Ta, ta for now. Manford