Yesterday was my sister’s birthday and today is my mom’s birthday. So I just wanted to wish my mom happy birthday as well and tell her that I hope she had a good birthday. You still look young mom, even if you are old enough to have a daughter who is married :)

This blog posting is in honor of my little sister who is turning 21 years old today! I was going to post a picture of us as little kids, but unfortunately I don’t have a scanner yet and the library doesn’t either. (What kind of library doesn’t have a scanner??? Apparently the kind that we have here :) So no embarrasing pics of her and me as little kids :( Anyways, I hope you have a great birthday darling sister! (And Sari, stop trying to catch up to me in age! It is only going to both make us older than we want to be :)

So I had a Iced Cafe Mocha from the local Starbucks today. It is a recently opened one around here and I wanted to see if it was any better than the other one in town (which has absolutely no comfortable seating). The good news is that there is some comfy seating at this new one, although not very much unfortunately. The bad news is that I think the cafe mocha had cane sugar in it. Bummer! It seems like this is fairly common for coffee shops unfortunately. One of the other ones in town definitely uses cane sugar in their drinks. For those of you who don’t know, I have food allergies and unfortunately cane sugar is one of them. Most people don’t know that there is more than one type of sugar and that cane isn’t even the most common necessarily. A lot of foods are made with beet sugar (another very common type of sugar), but it is impossible to tell what kind of sugar a food has in it without eating it and discovering through a reaction. The nice thing is that since a lot of packaged or restaurant foods have specific suppliers, you can usually depend on the company sticking with the same type of sugar. And as far as using sugar for baking, Crystal Sugar is always beet sugar (which is good, since buying sugar labeled as beet sugar is ridiculously expensive).

All that to say, I probably won’t be frequenting this starbucks very often unless I feel like being sick :( Oh well, I can always get my sugar/coffee fix from Ferrero Pocket Coffees (which luckily do not seem to bother me).