Marian - the paper size is 11"x17" for the course but I gather in 'real life' it would be at least 24"x36" or bigger... Mary - I have noticed the ads for the English Gardening School in the RHS magazine. And there are the RHS courses too... I guess one advantage of the U of G courses is you can just take the courses that interest you and they can count towards a certificate/diploma or not, as you like. So there no feeling that you didn't complete a program if you want to stop after just one course. The Internet format was ideal for me; it's just that the course content wasn't quite what I was looking for. I'll have to look around at options and then see whether I'm still in the mood to do something more once the gardening season is over for this year. Saucy - The reference to the clematises is in the verbal description of the plan. You need the plant list key to find them on the drawing (and the drawing posted here is too small to read the numbers anyway! :-) GB - I was going to consult with you about what ones to use but ran out of time and just named ones I was familiar with! The transparent house was interesting. I had to 'build' it from scratch with only the floor plan outline, the height of the walls as provided by the teacher, and the fact that there was a 2' roof overhang! It's not quite right I think on the back part of the house but good enough for the purpose of the assignment. The whole isometric drawing thing is actually quite simple to do - if a bit fiddly and tedious! You follow a straightforward process using fairly crude shapes for the plants (drawn to scale based on mature height and spread) and, when you put it all together, it produces that rather astonishing drawing - with zippo artistic talent required on my part! Since it was all done at a scale of 1/8" = 1' small details were killers to work with. It took me two days to draw that table and tuteur! Rotating things 30 degrees when they're that small and have so many lines (all those chair legs etc.!) is hard on the eyes... And since the technique produces a 3-D effect, I kept losing track of what was bottom and what was top as the little image seemed to have a life of its own and 'morphed' a lot :-) And tilting everything at 30 degrees started to 'get' to me - when I was reading something after working on the drawings for a while, the text of what I was reading seemed to be on a slant! But it was mostly fun - and good mental exercise :-) But now it's time to mess around in the real garden! I do hope to get out and measure things next week and do a proper scale drawing of the front garden and the changes I want to make there. (I suspect I may end up just 'winging it' as usual if spring gets underway quickly sometime soon and I run out of planning time....:-)

That is awesome. A lot of gliders and helicopters fly over my house but can never get pictures.

Thanks everyone. I think I might forego any assigned seating at all - there will be no wedding party, and the only parents left between the two of us are my mom & stepmom. My two moms might feel awkward being stuck at the same table, and choosing one to sit with me would hurt the other's feelings. I also suspect that I won't sit in any one place for long. Lots of circulating (and too nervous to sit still anyway), maybe I'll grab a salad plate & eat that somewhere, then get some lasagne and have that somewhere else, then a piece of cake at another table... Good point about not everyone eating at once. That's kind of how I imagine it. Gellchom, you bring up something I hadn't thought of - someone clearing tables. We've had a good number of parties at my dad's place (he died at the end of last summer, and I can't help but think of it still as his place), and generally, we just have a few large trash cans so guests can clear their own places. Is that really tacky to do for a wedding? I think there will probably be between 100 & 150 guests at the wedding, but that includes some babies & very young children. I just came up with another (unrelated) question about his/my families. Will start a new thread. Thank you again. Carrie

I was born in '65 and remember when the astronauts' space capsule(s) would land in the sea and be fished out. When I was about 13, my friend Joyce began babysitting for a family who had this thing called a microwave oven. She said the two young boys that she babysat assured her that she could put plastic bowls of food in that oven to heat them up. I KNEW she was confused about something as there was NO WAY you could put plastic bowls into any kind of oven.... Sheilajoyce - I have my grandma's (born 1904) gingersnap recipe which calls for bacon fat as one of the ingredients. You didn't waste ANYTHING in the old days! Holy moly are those cookies delicious! Jemdandy - I have letters between my engaged grandparents from during WWI. My grandfather mentions how he can only visit my grandmother for 1-2 days because of the war travel rules. It wasn't as though anyone would check up on his travel plans or anything, but everyone knew the rules and they lived by them. It's astonishing to read their letters and realize how little they actually knew about each other and how little time they spent together before they were married.