The Birthday List #38

Ride a Camel

- added to my birthday list when I found that camel riding was a tourist attraction in Port Macquarie, where we spent a week of our holiday.

The chances of ticking off everything on the list are not looking very good! I'm going to have to speed up my efforts a little. Of course, I'm sure I'll do lots of things that I didn't think to put on the list. Like experiencing a magnitude 7.1 earthquake!

Christmas Trees and Birthday Candles

It was the end of an era as we celebrated my youngest son's 21st birthday. All my five children are now officially adults, which makes me feel rather old. Or at least, I still feel the same age I always felt, so how did it happen exactly?

Of course several of them still live at home, they know where it is cheapest!

We had a party with buffet dinner at our home last weekend, which meant Thursday and Friday evenings and most of Saturday were spent cooking casseroles, desserts, birthday cake, a roast leg of lamb and vegetables. We also tidied up a bit. We even put the Christmas tree away. Yes that's right, the Christmas tree. Only six months late. (It was suggested that we leave it up to celebrate "mid-winter Christmas" which is quite popular in these parts, however the birthday boy wanted it put away). We don't use the large front room all that much and I am a champion procrastinator. In fact last year I got as far as putting away the decorations, but the tree itself stayed up all year, which is something of a record.

We used to have a real tree which of course did get disposed of after a couple of weeks, but these days we have a synthetic one. There's only one thing more forlorn than a Christmas tree past it's best and that's a used birthday candle. The tree at least went off with our green waste to be mulched and made into fertiliser for people's gardens. (Very good of the City Council to charge us for green waste so they can mulch it and sell it back to us).

But what do you do with a used birthday candle? Sometimes we re-use them, but you can't really get away with that more than once, it would just look cheap to put a stub of a candle on the cake. Someone should start a business collecting up and recycling used birthday candles - you could melt them down and make new candles from them, or turn them into biofuel, or use the wax for batik, or melt them into weird statues, or something. Maybe I could melt them down and make little floating tea-lights.

I was one of those conventional old-fashioned mothers who stayed at home until the children were all at school, then found the work world didn't really want me any more. It took a while, but I think I've managed to re-invent myself and find a place in the world. I think the Christmas trees and birthday candles deserve that too.

We managed to spin out the celebrations and have a family dinner as well on the actual date which was Friday. Tomorrow he's off to Paris for a week and a half. It's too late at night for me to bother to link to the previous post, which had the link to the news article which explains why he's off to Paris. In fact I think it is high time I got to bed.

Happy (Insert Holiday of your Choice...)

By now Thanksgiving must be over in the United States, even though for most of our Friday it is Thursday there. I hope all of my blog friends are happily tucked up in bed digesting their turkey (or tofurkey or festive meal of your choice).

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving here, but today was my daughter #2's birthday - a quarter of a century as daughter #1 put it - so we had a family roast lamb dinner, followed by cake. Unfortunately my favourite chocolate cake recipe has been letting me down lately, for some reason it won't rise properly, so we had a very heavy soggy cake, but it still tasted delicious. Lots of conversation with silly banter and laughter even though if I wrote the conversation down (which I didn't), I suspect I would look at it afterwards and think "Why did we laugh at that?"

Then the two girls wanted me to give them lifts home, so I dropped daughter #1 at her house, and took daughter #2 to a friend's house, then both girls into town where they were going to continue the celebration by going to a strip club. And then I headed home and came to a police road block. Oh crap! I thought. Even though I had only had a glass and a half of wine and was fairly sure I was OK. Which I was. Passed the breath test with no problems. It's a good thing I didn't have any of the whisky that we gave the birthday girl to sample (a very fine whisky brought back from the smallest distillery in Scotland). (Which was, of course, why she wanted a lift to her friend's house, where she had left her scooter, and why the girls wanted a lift into town, and why they were planning to get a taxi home afterwards).

Driving after a glass and a half of wine - about three times as much wine as my usual quota with dinner - is about as wild as my life gets. Which doesn't seem much qualification for being a writer, even a writer of blog posts. But I promised a post a day in November, so this is what you get.

And since everyone seems to be noting what they are thankful for, today I am thankful for family, and birthdays, since getting older is way better than the alternative.