Today is a perfectly ordinary day other than the fact it is the day when I celebrate my first half century on this planet.  I hope for many more years to come but I am grateful for those that I have already had.  I am a very fortunate and happy lady.  Some of the wonderful things I have experienced:

• seeing something I have planted and nutured grow and bloom
• meeting my three daughters for the first time
• crying in despair and wiping my eyes and realising I can still laugh and smile
• the smell of a warm, slightly damp dog
• a family, oddly shaped, but a family nonetheless
• opening my stocking and knowing that Father Christmas had been in my room whilst I slept
• the gentle touch of my husband
• a wonderful roof over my head
• the chance to live in another culture
• the burning passion to set things right
• an education
• friendships of all shapes and sizes
• glamour when I was just old enough to understand and young enough not to care
• freedom of expression
• Caithness and Sutherland
• belief in tomorrow
• big blowsey garden parties that go on forever and where children sleep where they fall
• seeing dreams, both large and small, come to fruition
• being a stay at home mummy
• writing a book
• summers in North Dakota

I could go on and on, but you get my drift.  My life is not necessarily what I expected but it is all the richer for that.  In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway bet ten dollars that he could write a complete story in just six words. He wrote: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  He won the bet.  An American online magazine asked its readers to write their lifestory in six words.  You will find mine at the bottom of the page here. 

So to celebrate those fifty wonderful years I have invited 14 friends to dinner on Saturday.  As it is my birthday I shall not be cooking, the food will be provided by the supremely talented Andy at Papaya.  However, I do need to decorate the table and so forth and fully intend to do so without buying a single thing.

The before, I have started to put a few of the glass jars out but most of them are soaking to get them all nice and sparkly!

I can’t show you the after as I haven’t done it yet!  However I am thinking garden flowers and greenery in the various sized glass jars.

 

We have lots of 2 and 3 candles silver candlelabras but I am prefering  glass jars and bottles with candles and tea lights.  The lavendar is still doing beautifully so that is going to feature heavily and I have decided to starch the damask napkins so that I can be creative with the folding (more flowers there I think too).   I have plenty of empty tin cans of various sizes from small to vast and ribbon and flowers will be going on there as well.  Chair covers are in the wash but I am not hugely fond of them, they are too dark.  Not sure I can rustle up 16 made to measure covers in  2 days so am going to have to think a bit there.

We have plenty of crockery and cutlery.  However,  a recent rash of slippery fingers has reduced our large glassware somewhat so that i have had to buy.  Ebay has been a godsend.  Crystal glasses go for very little.  I have stuck to a shape and mixed and matched.  Wonderful bargains and beautiful glasses that will give pleasure for years to come (so long as the slippery fingers don’t get them).

 

 

On of our new glasses, full of course, next to my favourite Inuit bear.

After photograph on Saturday.  This is my dry run for Christmas.  No buy parties.