All good

Well, it's all good here. Daughter # 1 called with the good news that she had received a $1600 raise on Friday p.m. and this is particularly noteworthy as she's only begun the position in October so apparently they understand she's a good catch as well as we do.

The big news on the domestic front is (drum roll please)......we have a new cleaning lady who will start this Friday. She lives just down the road and is an immaculate housekeeper herself so it's a good situation for both of us. I only had to clean two hours on Saturday morning before she came down to find out where everything was. Yes, I know cleaning before a cleaning lady arrives is dumb, but I didn't want to scare her off before she even started. And what I'm describing as cleaning as picking up a coil of rope with moss hanging off it from the Man Cave, throwing surplus computer parts in the hall closet, getting the laundry hamper down so that the lid would close, that sort of thing - crises management really. And of course there is always the need to have surfaces to clean thus the 'evening before pick up' so I must get back into the routine.

I finished reading The Flying Troutmans and am passing it on to a fellow fan before the library due date. It is as expected, another great read by Miriam Toews and I highly recommend the few evenings it will take to make your way through it.

The fellow fan noted above is my most recent cruise travel partner who spent her Saturday in the very enjoyable exercise of shopping in the city with her future daughter-in-law, mother of the bride and attendants for the wedding dress. Apparently the exercise was successful as well as fun with THE dress being purchased, nice lunch at The Fireside and getting to know the female members of the wedding party. Now since my friend is the mother of only one male child this was a highlight event. With three females and one male offspring in this family I may have the chance to participate in various reincarnations of this activity.

I'm including evidence that I DID learn something at the camera workshop. The exercise in the photo on the right was to focus in on the foreground (branch) while capturing a fuzzy (sconce) background. All the shots I threw away, taught me even more things of course, the main one being that it will require a number of these sessions before I make sense of some of the concepts. I think I shall put my new skills to work to immortalize the advent type wall decoration we hang every holiday here. The oldest daughter sent a message asking "did Dad change the bear before he went lobstering this morning?" But as I told her - Dad was the bear before he went lobstering with the price hanging at around $3 per pound, even with his catches up a bit, there is no joy in Whoville this year. The wall hanging circa 1984 or 85 has a bear who searches for Christmas in various locations of his house and the right to 'change the bear' resulted in loud protests of who's turn it was, tussels on the stairs and surreptious early morning risings to 'be the one' a few years back.

I got a late call from the local school on Friday saying they had one box of oranges left from the citrus order if I wanted them - did I ever - headed right up there on my lunch hour to pick them up. I dropped in to Frenchy's on my way back and managed to score a new pink dress which will be great for the neighbour's summer wedding at White Point Resort, a new pink top, a Christmas print scrub top for the nursing student who will be working four hours on Christmas day at the local nursing home and a great holiday, handpainted silk tie which I'm trying to convince the future son-in-law he can give to his Dad for Christmas.

The cruise speaking offers keep arriving in my inbox and if I had more money and free time there would be many choices as to where I'd be spending the month of January. Top of the list would be the offering for the Celebrity Infinity (shown at right) which offers a two week cruise from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso Chile and then two week repeat return trip with description below with itinerary at left:

Destination-Related Special Interest Speaker in the areas of: South America Music /Art History /Cultural /Nature/Wildlife or Dance Duo. The opening is on board the Celebrity Infinity, visiting South America. There are two cruises. The candidate can do one or the other or both cruises back to back.

When I suggested to my last cruise travel partner that we should run away she replied that we could be the dance duo. Hmm.

For those of you with more time and money, I'm pasting some travel advice:

WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT TRAVEL

Shanda Stefanson, DAILY TAKEOFF.COM Ask anyone who has travelled to tell you about their experiences and they will inevitably regale you with tales of the amazing things they experienced and how much they loved it. You may even feel inspired to travel yourself after hearing the nothing-but-good-things they have to say about it.

But before you set out, be warned that they are only giving you part of the picture, not out of a malicious desire to hide the truth from you, but from the natural human tendency to only remem ber the goods things that happen to us. Unfortunately, the rosy-coloured reminiscing of your friends will not help you prepare for the downsides of travel that will sneak up on you.
The Traveller's Learning CurveThe first time you travel, you will be terrible at it. While most people wouldn't think of travelling as something you can learn to do, I would definitely define it that way. It's like starting a new job. It's scary and unfamiliar at first, there are new skills to learn, new ways of doing familiar things.

From the little things like packing your backpack in a way that makes sense or figuring out how to buy fruit in European supermarkets (you can't just bring them to the till like you do in Canada), to the bigger things like budgeting your money or getting used to the pace and stress of travel, everything you do will be a challenge when you start out. You will likely be intimidated and scared by it, but as you get more comfortable with being in a new place every day and get the packing process down to two minutes flat, you will feel like you are indeed learning to travel.

Don't expect to be an expert right off the bat and the learning process will be part of the fun.
Travel Is HardUnless you're taking a three-week vacation on a beach, travelling is hard work. Add to that the jet lag that you're likely to be coping with and the strain of being far from home. It's hugely challenging, emotionally and physically, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

I can't count the number of times that little things like missing a train or breaking a shoelace have reduced me nearly to tears, mostly due to the sheer exhaustion I was dealing with. If you get to this point, don't feel guilty about taking a day to just rest. Stay in bed all day or spend the afternoon with a book in a familiar setting like a coffee shop to recharge your batteries. The rest of your travels will be much more fulfilling if you give yourself some time to recuperate, even if you have to cross some things off your itinerary. Nothing is much fun when you feel like a child on the verge of a temper tantrum.

Sometimes Travel SucksNobody will ever tell you about the bad times they had travelling, unless it's with the humourous spin that often comes with hindsight. But it's the truth. Sometimes travel really sucks.

You will get sick, you will get home sick, guide books will give you misleading information, you will lose your passport, borders will get closed, it will rain for weeks on end, cathedrals will be closed for renovations. Things will go wrong. There will be days when you will really wonder what the heck you're doing so far from home and wish you had never left. You'll then wonder what's wrong with you that you're on the trip of a lifetime and all you can think about is how much you'd love to eat a cheeseburger and crawl into your own bed. But don't worry; it happens to the best of us.

I wouldn't believe anyone who told me that every moment of every trip they've ever taken was perfect. It just doesn't happen. Don't get down on yourself for being down on travel once in a while. Let yourself feel that for a while, go to McDonalds, then suck it up and get back to enjoying yourself. The only way these crummy days will ruin your trip is if you let them ruin your attitude.

The Ups and DownsI am not trying to dissuade you from travelling -- far from it. It's just much too easy to forget the practicalities of it when you have your romantic vision of the perfect holiday in your mind's eye as you buy your plane tickets. In my experience, the pros far outweigh the cons and every trip, whether it goes as planned or not, is something that will teach you things you never even imagined about yourself, the world and about life. In fact, the fewer things that go to plan, the more memorable the trip can be.

But a realization that travel, like life, is not always a bowl of cherries will help you to be prepared to meet those little surprises with humour and the determination not to let them ruin your trip.

And for those of you who are getting a bit stressed about the holidays I'm pasting this article from today's Chronicle - and no I'm not on track with preparations, have to wait for the cleaning lady to unearth the surfaces to decorate remember?

Balancing elegance, budget Holiday gatherings don’t need to cost a fortune; keep focus on friends, family, togethernessBy ALEX WILLIAMS New York Times News ServiceMon. Dec 8 - 4:46 AM

NEW YORK — I heard a jingle. No, it wasn’t an angel getting its wings. It was my iPhone, carrying word that David Monn, the celebrated New York event planner, was on his way to meet me at Kmart.

I had called Monn with a challenge: to see if he could design a transcendent holiday dinner party for eight at my West Village apartment on a recessionary budget — say, $30 a head (or less than one-hundredth the budget he’s sometimes used to) for food, decor, everything.

Monn said he was game. Considering that he was just back in town from designing the lavish party celebrating the renovation of the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach for 1,500 guests, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean Combs, the challenge seemed like handing the artist John Currin a can of Krylon high-gloss and asking him to spray paint a piece worthy of auction at Sotheby’s. But Monn insisted that the tanking economy was actually an opportunity.

"The thing about the recession is, it takes the pressure off," said Monn, 45. "It allows you to strip away all the stuff that’s not important and focus on what is: friends, family, togetherness."
Monn, however, probably did not understand how much he would have to strip away — for starters, everything I knew about holiday entertaining. Even with the domesticating influence of my fiancee, Joanna Goddard, whom I live with, my instincts as a party host seemed to freeze two years out of college.

Maybe with Monn’s help, I would do my part to rescue the holidays for others, and perhaps along the way, my own reputation as a host. But I would have to do it for less than some socialites spend on a spa treatment.

"When you have a budget, you have to think, ‘What’s going to make the biggest impact with the least amount of money?’ " Monn explained. For my party, for example, he decided on a "winter wonderland theme." This was not simple nostalgia for the days before global warming wiped out the holiday sleigh ride. Rather, he chose it because winter is white, and white is cheap.

A roll of quilting batting, for instance, to use as a tablecloth; a 500-sheet bundle of copy paper, which he planned to use to make delicate paper snowflake cutouts to suspend from my living room ceiling with fishing line. Cover them with glitter and dim the lights and they might as well be Steuben crystal.

Still, with only about $100 to spend on groceries, he said, we would have to keep things simple. For dinner, we would start with a pureed-chestnut soup. Perked up by a half-cup of heavy cream and a cup of Sauternes, that didn’t sound too austere, I thought, even if the ingredients were inexpensive.

On a tight budget, we couldn’t afford cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery down the street for dessert. Instead, Monn said, we would make do with an angel food cake from Food Emporium ($4.29). Slather it in store-bought frosting and dried coconut shavings, however, and who would know the difference?

And for the main course, he said, we would have potatoes.
Potatoes.

I could almost see my own skepticism reflect back at me, as if his face were a mirror. Yes, I thought, minimalism is sexy in flush times. But does it have to feel like a sentence in lean ones?
Monn assured me that these would be special, twice-baked potatoes, as big as brontosaurus eggs. Besides, throw enough dietary fat into a recipe, and that in itself acts as a form of antidepressant. We would, he said, "pull the inside out, and fill them with lots of stuff you don’t want to tell your doctor about — cream, sour cream, probably a pound or two of butter."
The toppings would be a choice of mushroom ragout and chili.

After ringing up $72 at the Kmart checkout counter, we headed to our next destination, Jack’s 99 Cent Store near Herald Square. Politely nudging through the clogged aisles of the deep-discount emporium, the dapper Monn reminded me of a late-model Bentley stuck in traffic. But he seemed in his element. Stopping at a wall covered in silver and gold Christmas ornaments, Monn lovingly handled an opaque plastic maple leaf that glistened with silver glitter.
"Simple and elegant," he said, as if reciting a mantra. They were 50 cents each. He loaded his basket with 20. He would find a use for them, he assured me.

With the groceries ordered, our shopping was finished — final price tag: $238.40.
On Saturday, Monn dropped by our apartment in the afternoon to set up the room. By the time he was gone, the snowflakes danced from our ceiling like a Calder mobile. Our battered dining table, hauled in from the kitchen, was covered in layers of white; it glowed like fresh snow at first light. He gave us a shot of parting advice — "Dress up a little," he said, "it’s free." And then he was gone.

Whatever else unfolds during this supposedly downcast season, I would venture to say that eight people have already accumulated five memorable hours.