Happy Birthday

Today has been a joyful day.

It has been my birthday all day and it is almost midnight so I thought I would pop a happy birthday post in here. People from all over the world sent me birthday greetings and wishes and I have a huge smile on my face.  A little family came to visit me and brought balloons for my birthday. I do love balloons.

and my oldest son and his lovely wife gave me sunflowers. My daughter attempted to make a very elaborate cake without consulting me and downloaded a recipe from the internet which was not quite translatable but she did manage to produce a magnificent rafaello cake with butter cream, cream cheese filling and a topping of white chocolate ganache after a lot of tears and crashings about and a mountain of dishes. IT WAS DELICIOUS and simply looking at it I can feel the weight attaching itself to my body.

my youngest son hid Pfeffernuisse in spots around the house - whole packets that is- for me to find in a kind of treasure hunt because he knows I like them. I did not expect ten packets though.

and on my social media sites I had dozens of greetings and well wishes from all around the world. What a marvelous day. I feel very cared about. I now have three meal invitations so I will continue to celebrate for the next three days and I am going to see a play on Friday night. West Side Story performed by the Holiday Actors, a troupe of teenagers and young adults from Warrnambool. How extraordinarily loved I feel right now. I am so very grateful for all the wonderful people in my life, especially my children. Thank you all for making my day so wonderful.

Yesterday is history,who knows what there is going to be when we meet again...

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed....anyway it was a flat day yesterday and I felt like I achieved nothing of import. I did feel a grief for the death of two trees in my yard. One because wood borers had killed it, burrowing deep. I had watched it slowly dying over the past several years not knowing what to do to prevent its demise and yesterday the tree loppers came along and sliced through the branches and trunk with their variety of chainsaws then turn the stump to sawdust. The chipper came and turned the branches piled high on the front lawn, into tiny flakes of wood. The other tree had already been decimated when the house was built and was relegated to a mere stump, albeit a vigorously healthy stump which keeps putting out shoots to the chagrin of my neighbour. I am all in favour of the stump being vigorous. However the neighbour won this round by lopping off all the offending branches and sending them to the chipper with the branches from the bigger tree. I am planning to replace both trees with three more and deciding what I want to put in there. The tree loppers wanted to take out all my big trees and I felt very angry at the stupidity and shortsightedness of such a suggestion. One of them suggested I put in a nice shrub. I wanted to respond more aggressively to that suggestion but managed to contain myself.Sadly, no matter what I plant I will be unlikely to see it in full canopied glory, shading the house and providing shelter for cicadas and birds. A tree is a lifetime commitment.

Sometimes I feel we are all angry selfish babies and it is "All about me".

Today is a better day. Today I had a beautiful fruit salad for breakfast and then set about doing some drawing and getting my blog back on track after neglecting it yesterday. I only managed a meagre 400 words on my novels so today I will dedicate time and effort to building my word count. It is a better day today and I will have momentous results from a more positive attitude.