Holiday Parties and Tickets Bought

It seems the holiday socializing season has started, kicking off with Alicia's birthday party ( lots of kids,dogs,relatives, and a lavish homemade Thai food feast partially pictured here) and continuing through this week and the next with staff parties, potlucks, preschool festivities, and a trek to Parksville this weekend to see a live-animal Nativity scene with our ten-year-old nephew.

Alas I will most likely miss this year's pagan Solstice celebration out Merville way (for the first time in years!), but I'm sure I won't let the season pass by without a bonfire at some point, or at least lighting a lot of candles to celebrate the returning of the light at the darkest part of the winter.

(And it's REALLY dark around these parts lately! In some neighbourhoods the power has been off for three days now after two wind-storms *bang* one right after the other took trees and power wires down together. And ANOTHER storm with gusts of one hundred kilometres predicted for tomorrow afternoon!)

Anyway, the Merville Solstice event planners usually schedule it right on the Solstice, but for some reason they planned it early this year and I'm plum out of town that night!

I console myself that one can't do everything after all.
:)

And on that note, due to a very purposefully small Christmas shopping list, I've so far managed to have very little stress about the season. It's the only way it should be.

I've also decided to skip sending out Christmas cards to obscure relatives who I'm sure have forgotten who I am---aunties and cousins, prove me wrong!

In lieu of the Christmas-card formalities, I've been going through my address book and reconnecting by telephone with all those people I really want to keep in touch with. I've had some great conversations. How do I lose track of these fantastic people?

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Aside from party planning and having long phone calls, my mind has been taken up with a different sort of holiday planning.

Jeff and Tai and I have been spending a lot of time emailing Italy lately, hammering out hotel reservations at frustrating lengths and searching for an apartment in Rome for the last week we will have there in May.

The nine hour time difference makes the emailing process a long drawn-out one and, word to the wise, if you're ever planning a holiday in places like Rome and Venice it's never too early to start booking accomodation. Time and time again, we've thought we'd found a likely place in our price range only to be told, mi dispiace, that they are are already booked full already.

However, I think we may actually have gotten a few things confirmed. I'll post pics of our apartment if it's a definite thing.

(Note: My brother Adam left for Nicaragua yesterday. He is the champion of budget travel and doesn't mind a dirt floor or sleeping in a hammock. He once rented an apartment in the Honduras for something like thirty dollars a month and that rent was split between three people. He figured his sister was just not looking in the right places for a cheap sleep in Rome and did some research on my behalf. His conclusion: Damn, it's expensive in Italy!)

We DO have our air tickets booked. There was a last minute scramble to change some flight itineraries when our travelling partner Pol decided that three weeks was just too long to be away from her home and family (both financially and emotionally). I'm glad she's coming for the first two weeks anyway, and she will fly home from Firenze while the rest of us stay on for a few more limoncellos.

I'm really looking forward to staying in Rome for a whole week. The first time I visited Rome I stayed a gut-wrenchingly short two nights and I didn't see half of what I wanted to see! (Well, actually I saw some of those other things but I was travelling at the speed of light at the time, hanging out a tour bus window. That's the trade-off of a tour: you lose some personal freedom in exchange for all the annoying trivia of where to sleep and how to get places taken care of. At least once this week, I quietly wished all we had to do was show up for a pre-packaged holiday. But then the moment passed.)

Hmmm...upon reflection, I actually stayed three nights in Rome, but I'd arrived at nine o'clock at night at the airport and spent most of that first evening alternately stumbling around my hotel's neighbourhood in the throes of jet-lag looking for a telephone that would accept my calling card and trying to get the key to work in my hotel door. Ah, memories!

But I knew that one day I'd return to Rome (having thrown a coin in the Trevi fountain it was practically guaranteed according to tradition) and get a chance to see more of it.

And some of the favourite things again! How could I not have a second visit to the Cappucin monks' crypt on the Via Veneto to see the chandeliers made from humanbones again? Skull-bones are stacked in mandalas, and the old monks themselves, centuries old and resembling dried shoe-leather, are propped up around the place. You have to see it to believe it.

Diets That Work: Voodoo and Divorce

Two unusual diets I Have Been Made Aware of Recently:

1) The Voodoo Curse Diet: I recently attended a meeting (which got a little side-tracked because of this revelation) where I met a sweet lady who was beside herself with anxiety because she believes herself to be under a curse.

Originally, she simply sought a local doctor's second-opinion about her unusual skin allergies during a visit to her native Phillipines. The local healer gave her fabulously expensive skin ointments and convinced her that a jealous co-worker in Canada who has long hair was maliciously sticking pins in a doll to harm her.

Upon return to Canada, her allergies have not improved with the ointments and she has realized that every single one of her co-workers has long hair.

Weight loss due to voodoo stress: thirty pounds in two months!

2) The Non-Amicable Divorce Kick-Boxing Diet: Another woman I know has dropped almost seventy pounds after a nasty divorce. Six months later, she is a cute little (four foot eight) kick-boxing dynamo, hanging out at martial arts studios for "stress relief". I sense that it's not the big rubber punching bag she's really kicking... I'm rather proud of her!

Here is the diet I am on: The-Eat-Sensibly-and-Exercise-Regularly Diet

Pounds lost in a month: One.......sigh. Why do drastic painful diets always seem to be the ones that produce results?

(Not that I'm considering either of them).

Here's the other Diet I'm working on: The Make Your House Lose Weight By the New Year By Chucking the Junk Out the Door in Frustration Diet

I think my closets and basements could stand to lose a couple hundred pounds.

For instance, for a start, here are four bags of clothes from our closets that are waiting in our garage for the nice charity clothes-drive truck to arrive.

I recently spoke with a friend who implied it would be nice to be able to blithely chuck out junk without a second thought like I did....

A-HA-HA-HA-HA! (If I'd been drinking root-beer when she said that, I'd have been snorting it through my nose).

You see, I do have junk and I do find it hard to get rid of things. It's just not always plain when you walk into my house because it seems fairly tidy. But don't open all the closets, m'kay?

I'm grateful that I have a nice big house with a big basement and lots of closets. She doesn't. I hope I made her feel better that she's not the only pack-rat in her circle of friends.

But room for it or not, the clutter is really bugging me lately, so it's time for a House Diet, no excuses.

The Excuses:

a) I've been collecting things to sell at my flea-market for some years to fund my annual trip to Europe. And I think I've done pretty well after seven years of converting Crap-to Culture.

But I think I'm almost done with that means of income now because free-lance gardening and odd-jobs have the potential to make as much money without the clutter-collecting and I think I might need a break from the flea-market. (Not saying I'll never to it again with Brand-New-Fresh-Junk).

But darn it, it's hard to put an item in a box for the Goodwill when you say to yourself, "This could be worth two dollars at my garage sale!"

b) I've been storing a lot of things from the daycare where I work at my house, but I've decided I'm going to bring most of it back to the storage place there. If it's at my house, the children aren't using the toys/craft supplies anyway. And if we simply have too much stuff at work, then maybe it's time to let some of the broken/non-used things go anyway. Puzzles with missing pieces will never be anything other than frustrating.

Also, I asked around--nobody else is willing to take some of the daycare stuff to their houses either, so I don't feel too guilty. :)

So really, with those two excuses gone, I should be able to blithely chuck the junk from at least those two areas. Hopefully.

What was it that my friend Tai called it? Ah yes, maybe I've been suffering from CHUCKAPHOBIA !

Snow Days in Lotus Land

"People get excited about snow around here", commented my co-worker who has recently moved to British Columbia from Ontario.

That was on Tuesday, after a weekend snowstorm closed all the schools down on Monday.

Yes, we do get excited on Vancouver Island when it snows--so excited that we both also had days off work on Wednesday and Thursday when a second blizzard dumped a second foot of snow on top of the first fourteen inches.

Not that Jeff and I weren't "working" after a fashion. I don't want to touch another shovel for a long, long time.

It's pretty and sparkly in the sunshine. It looks nice on the trees. But it's damn heavy and the next house I buy will have a shorter driveway.

Also, next time I hear of inclement weather on the way I will make a beeline to the grocery store BEFORE the snow-storm so I am not stuck in a slow,winding, grueling line-up of grocery carts with tempers fraying all around when the roads are finally clear.

And alas, although I like the IDEA of snow, it has wreaked havoc in my garden, burying my shrubs in an icy embrace, pulling my climbing hydrangea off of its trellis, and cracking off major branches on my lilac tree. I can see other places in my yard where there is probably more snow damage, but I'm waiting until after the snow melts before I investigate.

I've heard that snow is a good insulator and you can actually damage plants more by trying to get all the snow off them. Yeah, that's it. (Really I'm just scared to find out how bad the damage is--I've been watching the news and the Butchart and Van Dusen public gardens are hurting too.)

So anyway, here are some pictures of my week in the snow. And also a few pictures of the beaches of Zanzibar (and my feet in warmer times) for a little contrast. Helps me feel less chilly as I write this. I was there during the African winter. It's much nicer than ours.

Though, durn it all, we're not supposed to get snow like this around here! They're predicting more flurries on the way.

And although we're not as freaking cold as places like poor Calgary, I can still see icicles forming on my neighbour's house big enough to harpoon someone.

Places to Stay in Rome

This is a post mostly for Tai and Pol's benefit (they are the two friends that will be travelling with Jeff and I to Italy this Spring), but anyone up for a little vicarious trip planning is welcome to make a recommendation.

Basically, when we arrive in Rome the first evening (first two evenings actually), we'd like to have someplace already booked so we can have somewhere to dump our luggage immediately so we can put our jet-lagged feet up and have a glass of wine without worrying where we're going to sleep.

So here I am at home, having a Snow Day off work and surfing the Internet looking for suitable Roman guesthouses.

I found a website called Venere.com and found these places. What do you think? Any other suggestions?

Hotel Gea di Vulcano

Hotel Angel

Hotel Andreina

Does Anyone Else Worry About Losing Photos?

Once upon a time a friend of mine travelled in France and took many, many precious photos of her time there. She was researching a book at the time and so the photos, as well as being souvenirs, were valuable in other ways too.

She returned home, jetlagged but happy, and her digital photos were promptly downloaded onto her computer. The very next day her home was broken into and dastardly thieves made off with her computer.

*POOF!* The photos were gone forever. No discs or copies had been made.

When she related this story, even though it was some years after it happened, my heart gave a tragic lurch for her loss.

Oh, photos are so precious to me! I am probably the most camera-happy person you're ever likely to meet that is not actually a photographer by trade.

But I've been realizing I haven't been as careful as I should have been with some of my photos. Although I copy my travel photos onto disc right away, my day to day pictures are not always backed up, and recent computer problems have underlined the possibility that I could easily lose some before I get around to sharing them.

I'm just so glad I made physical copies of some of my favourites (or emailed them or put them on my blog) because it seems they have gone *POOF* on me. One was from a night at the Crow & Gate Pub two years ago and I'm just thanking my stars that all my friends have a copy besides the one hanging on the inside door of my kitchen cupboards.

(That's the best place to have photos if not actually on your wall...in your cupboards. You open the door to grab some cereal and there are your favourite people smiling at you.)

Anyway, I was talking to Kim today about taking so many photos and forgetting to share the ones that don't always make it to the relevant blog posts. Time passes and I say to myself: 'oh, I already wrote about that event', or 'that happened two months ago so everybody already knows about that' and I don't get around to showing the pictures to anybody.

They are lost in my computer's picture file vortex forever.

So, my long-winded point here is that I want to share these pictures (and others I'll be posting soon in random re-cap posts) so that all my dear friends who care to have some of them can right-click and nab themselves a copy.

Then when Spider Girl's computer goes bye bye next time, she won't work herself into such a froth. :)

Numa Numa Bunny

As evidence that my friends and I are moving up in the world and hob-knobbing with the soon-to-be-famous-and-noteable, here are Kim (her blog explains it all a bit more) and I pictured posing with minor cardboard celebrity (and Arctic hare) Smilla Vanilla .

You can see Smilla's musical debut (with co-star Uni-Brow Bear) in the brilliant and avant garde Numa Numa video made by Kim and Shawn last week. Filmed on location (apparently) in, um, London, Paris, Cairo, Las Vegas, and of course our very own Hollywood North---the Comox Valley!

I'm sure that it will go on to become an integral part of the socio-cultural online phenomena that is the Numa Numa song's legacy.

Especially if y'all go to the video link and *cough cough* leave nice ratings and comments about it. :)

Yes, I'm sure the young lads from the Romanian pop group O-Zone are grinning their heads off about this somewhere.

Evil Scrabble Players

Look at these letters!

EI EI O! What is this, McDonald's farm?

And the remaining letters......those stand for AAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIII! (My sound of frustration as I am royally trounced at Scrabble by my friend and her mom who play to win.)

My kingdom for a consonant!

Storms, Snarl, and Wowie-Shazam

Okay, this is a post about this and that.

First of all, the weather has been more than a wee bit blowy around these parts. This is a tree that just up and fell over onto the road about a block away from my house. during the windstorm night before last.

Another huge chunk of tree was sheared off by the wind in the children's play-yard at work. Nobody was nearby fortunately--we were all sensibly inside due to the torrential rainfall.

I just read an article about a woman who has received a large sum of money for funding a completely outdoor year-round daycare in Scotland. The seventeen toddlers attending will play, nap, do chores, and use the composting-toilets, all outdoors. The only shelter will be a small wattle-and-daub structure with no walls.

Hmmmm...I realize the value of fresh air and outdoor play, but frankly I'm skeptical about how this will work out. Maybe in the summer. Maybe in Hawaii. But winter-time in Scotland? Good luck with that, dearie.

The storm that hit yesterday caused a lot of road wash-outs and landslides near places on the Island like Gold river and Sayward. Some loggers at the company Jeff works for (he is an accountant there) had to spend the night in their pick-up trucks after they were trapped behind a landslide during a snowfall. They were rescued this morning by helicopter.

Another group of employees (and Jeff's boss) had to walk three kilometres out of the bush in another place until they reached the road and were picked up by a passing Hydro crew.

Back at the office, Jeff had to make a series of phone-calls: "Uh, about so-and-so...he's going to be late coming home tonight...."

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In other news, Tai and I and Jeff went for a spin around ToysRUs the other day. Everybody should have a play in a toystore once in a while.

Ostensibly, we were there to find a Marbleworks game for my preschool, but it turned out our real mission was to find Tai a Transformers toy named Snarl. He turns into a wolf. 'Nuff said.

Ya shoulda been there, Kim.








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And here is the new colour in my kitchen---the brightest Mexican yellow I could find. You can see my kitchen coming a mile away. (I decided that the modern sophisticated look I considered briefly would simply clash too much with my aura, so I went with this instead.)

The colour swatch had a really stupid name("Instant Delight"), but when I showed my selection to my friend Pol she blinked and commented enthusiastically, "Wowie! Shazam!"

So that is the colour's new name: Wowie-Shazam .

I put Tai's painting by Brian Scott that I'm storing for her up on the kitchen wall and it rather suits the background I think. Perhaps I could store it long-term, my friend?

Remembrance Day

As Remembrance Day was this past weekend, I decided to post some photos I took at the war cemetery above Omaha Beach in France two years ago.

From my journal then:
"Near Omaha Beach, where the Americans landed on France's shore and so many were mowed down, it is tranquil and pretty. A few of the houses near the beach are thatched. An ancient stone church still stands, somehow untouched by the war. Nearby we saw a few pieces of ruined landing craft, but the evidence from June 6th,1944 is scarce. The memorial at Omaha is a low-key stone monument (some people in the group expressed disappointment that it wasn't somehow MORE). The beach is peaceful and sandy.

I tried to imagine the boats landing and the soldiers arriving and the roar of the guns...I tried...but I just couldn't seem to register the tragedy that happened here sixty years ago.

A few children were digging in the sand with pails, and I looked around until I found a small broken seashell. I held some of the fine light sand in my fingers and let the wind blow it away. I felt faintly sad.

The next place I went, the War Cemetery itself, made more of an impression on me, although I still felt far away from the reality of the thousands of graves. The white marble markers --9387 of them--reminded me of sculpture--precise and geometrical and sanitized. Sparkling white against impeccable green.

Manicured trees and shrubs here and there softened the effect. It was quite beautiful in a serenely overwhelming fashion. There was a sprinkling of Stars of David among the Christian crosses.

I read the names and U.S. divisions on some of the graves as I wandered. No birth dates, only the date of death. Most of them from June 1944.

Looking through the pine trees, down over the cliffside by the cemetery, I could look right down onto Omaha Beach where they died. The thought that repeated in my head was "Oh, that June was a BAD month." A few of the dates showed some men made it to July, fewer to August."

While in France Jeff and I made some other World War II historical stops in some little Normandy villages: Port en Bessin-Huppain, where the secret wartime fuel line called PLUTO stopped (Pipe Line Under the Ocean); Sword Beach (where the Canadians landed), Benouville (where the liberating British paratroopers landed--home of the Pegasus Bridge); and Gold Beach where the British came ashore.

At Gold Beach, the old German "pill-boxes" where the German soldiers pointed their gun muzzles seaward were still there. Today you can climb steep metal ladders down into the dank, litter-filled pits they are now. Andrew, the nine-year-old travelling with our group charged happily down into them, but they looked awful to me.

Instead I wandered into a field of yellow canola flowers across from the beach. Much nicer than haunted pits.

This Remembrance Day Jeff and I took my Mom out to lunch. Dad was invited but he decided to stay home--he was feeling very emotional after watching the Veterans ceremony on television. He told me he kept thinking about his father's medals.

I was very lucky to have no one in my family die in the wars.

My mom's father was in the Airforce, patrolling way up north in the Aleutian Islands and my grandfather on my father's side was stationed in Belgium. I learned that some of the china plates treasured from my childhood up in the china-cabinet (like the one with the legend of Pandora's Box on it) were shipped home to my grandmother during the war. How they managed to travel all the way to Canada without breaking we'll never know.

Although no one died, the war changed my family in other ways. My grandfather brought home a war "bride" that was not my grandmother, for instance, and changed her life forever. I never met my grandfather and he left our family when my own father was just a young boy. Very, very sad.

Not a tragedy like someone dying fighting a war, but still sad.

Kitchen Idea and the Answer to My Little Blog Problem

My friend Pol (she of the graphic-designer eye) has some inspiring software that is great for home inspiration ideas.

She sent me this picture today after I asked for kitchen ideas. She even kindly added in a bowl of virtual peaches.

I've really admired that dark contemporary look in other people's homes, but I just plum never envisioned it in my own kitchen.

It's a bit of a switch from the orange-and-plaid look, I'd say. The only thing is I'm not sure if I want to stain my oak cabinets...but I have to say I'd consider it now....

What do y'all think?

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Oh, and Blogger finally got back to me about my blog problem. The reason I see a big blank spot at the top of my blog before the text starts (on one computer but not the other which sits right beside it---yes, HIS and HERS computers are a necessity in my home) is that I haven't yet upgraded to the new Internet Explorer. How annoying.

So if you are one of the ones who see my blog with a large zen introduction, it can be remedied apparently.

Renovations

I came home the other day to an enormous pile of rubble in my kitchen.

While I was off having fun at the UnBirthday Party this weekend, Jeff was ripping up the old crackling vinyl imitation-parquet floor to prepare for the installation of the new floor.

There seems to be a trend to the pattern of home renovations in my household.

1)I go off somewhere.

2)Then I come back.

Renovations are suddenly in progress, or even sometimes complete.

Once I went back-packing in the British Isles for three weeks and came home to a completely renovated bathroom. There was even a new cedar ceiling and wall installed.

And a few years back, I toddled off to Italy alone and returned to an amazing renovation of the master bedroom closet: there were double rods and cubbyhole shelves and sweet little drawers . I'm quite sure that it was that closet that helped sell our old house.

It makes me want to go on vacation! (Don't worry, Jeff gets to come along sometimes!)

Well, I was only gone overnight this time and so the process is still in full swing. The roar of a belt-sander upstairs fills my ears as I write this. It was apparently a very annoying glued-down floor to take up and its left behind a lot of annoying stuck-on debris..

The photo above I took of Jeff is after a marathon bout of floor-ripping on his hands and knees. He wanted me to explain that if I posted the photo as he may look a little rough around the edges.

"Was there blood, sweat and tears involved?" I asked sympathetically when I came home.

"No blood fortunately", he answered. "A lot of sweat though. A few tears. And lots and LOTS of profanity. You can't have home renovation without profanity." :)

Ah, that may explain his sense of renovation timing.

Perhaps its due to my delicate sensibilities (oh, my ears!) that he waits until I'm out of the house before he starts these projects.

Last week Jeff, Kim, Baby Zoe, and I toured local hardware supply stores to find the best deal for laminate floors. As you can see from the photo above, we made a day of it and even camped out comfortably in the aisles a while. The wood we eventually chose was a quarter of our maximum planned budget so I'm quite pleased about that.

My own home renovation role seems to be Chief Wall Painter. It is almost time to change the look of my Cantaloupe and Plaid Kitchen (the previous owner's vision and not my own, although its coziness appeals to me about half the time) and I'm open to ideas.

Friends in the Moonlight

It's been a very happy Full Moon week.

First there was Halloween on Tuesday, which I celebrated as Samhain, the Celtic New Year. There was drumming around the bonfire, winking jack-o-lanterns, and the traditional walking of the labyrinth in my friend's frosty meadow.

Then there was a meeting of my women's circle on Thursday--ginger tea and singing and spontaneous circle magic to celebrate the good side of the dark time of the year. A marvellous evening!

And then, just this past Saturday, it was time for my most favourite people in the whole world to meet for our annual UnBirthday celebration.

Ah, the UnBirthday weekend. Several years ago the four of us (me, Tai, Kim, and Pol) decided to forego the exchange of birthday presents in favour of a special time together, celebrating all of us at once with an always amazing dinner (this time Indian food at The Great Escape in Cumberland) and a sleepover party.

We even stayed up later than usual this time. After dinner and a long evening filled with much laughter and conversation and goofines (and limoncello and cheese fondue), we were sitting around in our pyjamas at Kim's house looking through old photographs of ourselves from fifteen years ago. There were some pretty hilarious ones (remember, that was the late eighties) and also some very beautiful ones.

For instance, there was one of Tai dancing in a blue dress in a sunny meadow of sea-grass that was so gorgeous it took my breath away. I need a copy of that one. In fact, turns out there was a whole stack of photos we all wanted copies of.

In particular there were pictures from a long-ago evening when my friends and I painted our faces in wild pagan swirls and spirals and draped ivy in our hair and generally got in touch with our inner nature-spirit.

"Why don't we take more pictures like that again!", said Kim.

Oh yes! Let's! It's two o'clock in the morning and there's a brilliant clear full moon waiting for us outside.

There was a mad rush to the bathroom mirror and on went the wildest eyeliner and darkest lipstick we could find. Hair was piled and braided on our heads this way and that. Pol painted ivy on her face, Kim drew curlicues below her eyes worthy of the Sandman comics, Tai painted fierce streaks on her cheeks, and the phases of the moon appeared in blue on my forehead.

Out we rushed into the night to giggle and pose in a sustained flurry of camera flashes beneath the ancient pear tree in the backyard. Oh, my friends and I can have such outlandishly fun times!

Halloween