Ten Years: good for the marriage, murder for the table

Today is our 10th Wedding Anniversary. Congratulations, us! Thanks to God for giving Mr de Elba to me to have and to hold these 10 years, what a loving God you are! Please can I keep him?

I post this picture again because Blogger isn't uploading anything for me tonight, and I've had to pinch the HTML code for this from my post on 6th September. Crikey, look out for the crocs just left of camera.

Ten years ago, an old teaching friend of my father's gave this table complete with 6 chairs. It belonged to his father who had recently passed away, so it had supported many dinners already. It was in pretty good shape, and then it came to us.


For the first 7 years, it remained in fairly good condition. The extension insert looked like the rest of the table.

Then Sonny Ma-Jiminy became old enough to eat at our table. I will never understand how a child can create such a mess on a table, and I will never understand how wiping the table won't result in a complete clean. Gack.

At some point, the legs went from wobbly to dangerous, with one leg frequently hanging at a shocking angle to the floor and table, which miraculously remained parallel.

But the real damage was done a few months ago when our kitchen was being renovated. The table spent a few weeks outside on the deck in the elements covered by a flimsy green tarpaulin. Then came the storms. We've had some pretty severe storms in the south-east corner of Queensland recently, and during a heavy hail storm, the tarp blew off the table.

We decided not to brave the hail to go and re-cover the table, otherwise we would have been killed by the hailstones. So we let the table get thoroughly wet, and then dry the next day. By this stage, we'd decided the time had finally come for a new table, so our old one may just have got wet and dry a few more times before being brought inside after the kitchen renovation.

Once it came inside, the veneer started peeling off and the chipboard dislodged in showers onto he floor regularly. And that's how it got to be in such bad shape. The extention insert is now unrecognisably differet from the rest of the poor sad table.

Ten years. The marriage thrived, the table didn't.