Moved!

My move is done, just the aftermath to deal with. Everyone thinks the hard part is the packing and the actual moving. It's not. That's the easy... well, easier part. Taping together boxes and filling them is rote and mindless work, physically tiring and endless but it's just repetitive grunt work.  For the

Unpacking

move, we use a major moving company and they are great. They send two trucks, five guys and everyone is polite, respectful of our home and our stuff and know what they are doing. The moves usually go seamlessly as far as getting all our stuff from one place and into another.  It's all the rest of the moving details that make me crazy. Even the transfer of utilities is pretty painless now. I do as much online as a I can and we had our phone, internet, cable and utilities all set up the day after the move. Its the things you can't foresee that knock you sideways, as with life in general. And there are always things you can't foresee, even after as many moves as I have handled.

This move started with a mix up over keys. Due to issues with the rental agency we could only have one garage/elevator key fob. A bit of a problem when the fob is needed for everything and my husband and I had to be in two different places. I am still waiting for the extra fobs four days later. Then there was the leak. This is the second move we have had where a water leak was found on move in day, and leaks are problems, BIG problems, my friend. The previous leak required a refinishing of all the wood floors in the main floor of the home we had just moved into. All our furniture, carpets, artwork etc had to be moved out again for the floors to be redone. This time the leak is in the ceiling of our laundry room and will require the removal of drywall, etc, etc. It is starting to smell already. Welcome to your new home, Faye!

Ted having his non-Zen moment.

This is what a room full of paper looks
like when tamed.

Having boxes and packing paper delivered to your house is a breeze, one phone call and there they are. I also get used boxes off of Craigslist so they come into the house in small amounts. After a move there is a huge mound of flattened boxes to get rid of and enough crumpled packing paper to fill a room. Ted took on the most-dreaded job of flattening the paper and the boxes. The boxes were no challenge, a good knife, a few slits through the tape and a big space-gobbling box is flat against the wall. Very satisfying.  But the paper proved to be another thing altogether. I have friends who won't come near my house now until after the paper has been flattened. Everyone has been called in to help with it at one time or another and if you can get into the Zen moment of it the act can be relatively painless but if you don't it becomes the most disliked job in a move.  Ted rose to the challenge and smoothed out paper for hours but by the end he was ranting and raving, swearing to NEVER, EVER flatten a piece of moving paper again! Not too Zen. It's not rocket science but believe me, its a challenge. If you don't flatten it out you will be hauling garbage bags of crumpled paper out of your home for days.

Ted has left on a trip and I will be joining him in a couple of days. Till then I am, arranging for repairs, waiting for key fobs, slowly emptying boxes and stowing things away, all the while knowing I will most likely have to rearrange it all again. And maybe once more after that. No two houses have the same storage or closets and where you keep things is always going to be different. Moving is easy compared to settling in and making a home. And therein lies the most difficult part of the move, making someone else's home feel like yours. I'm pretty good at that part but it takes time. Check back with me in a couple of months and I'll let you know how its going but for now I'm still trying to find that damn wine opener!

Ted's office awaits him.

On The Move Again

I am moving at the end of this month.  This will be the fifth move in less than eight years for my husband and me.  It seems even worse when I see it written down. We are not young adults in our twenties with some clothes, a computer and a bed.  We are grown-ups with lots of stuff.  Lots and lots of stuff. About 13,000 pounds actually despite my many donations to the thrift store. I know what that amount of stuff feels like because I have packed and unpacked every item, each move, with my own hands.  When my husband brought up the idea of moving last month, the thought was unbearable to me, the memory of the last move was still fresh in my mind. The muscle memory was still there, all that bending, lifting, and the screeching of the tape gun, the stacks and stacks of packing paper. Ugh. But life wasn't always like this.

We lived in the first house we purchased for three years, then came a baby and the move to a larger house where we stayed five years and had another child.  The universe aligned and we had a chance to buy a view home and turn it into our dream home and spend fifteen happy years there. This was the longest period that either my husband or myself had spent anywhere. When our youngest son entered his final year of high school we were ready to move on from the suburbs and head back to the city.  The only problem with that was the difference in house values. For what we sold our large view home for in the 'burbs we could purchase a two bed, two bath apartment in Vancouver. So we decided to rent. That's where the trouble began. Selling a large home can be difficult, it took us six months, but giving your notice on a rental is easy. Thirty days and you are gone.

ah, the smell of new
boxes!

We stayed almost two and a half years in the first rental before Ted found a view home for rent he had to have. We moved. The kids were both gone so we had gotten rid of what felt like pounds and pounds of belongings when they went but it still felt like I was packing up a three ring circus.
The new home was lovely, the view stupendous, so nice in fact that after ten months we were given an eviction notice by the owner who wanted to move back in.  She couldn't find any where else to live that she liked as well. Our first eviction notice. We had to be out by the end of January, a terrible time to be looking for a place and an even more terrible time to actually be moving. Happy New Year everyone, pass the packing boxes.

Therein lies one of the downsides to renting, you are at the mercy of the owner. Our next move proved that out as well. We found a home with a more modest view and many, many stairs. Living there was like living on a Stairmaster. I developed buns of steel and after two and a half years grew weary of hauling my groceries up two long flights of stairs to the kitchen, steel buns or not.  I told our rental manager that we would not be renewing our lease and she said, "that's great, because the owners are moving back in!" They were supposed to have moved permanently to China but "surprise!" So we couldn't have stayed even if we had wanted to. Out came the boxes I had stored in the crawlspace. I never give away boxes, you can appreciate why.
This takes us to our current home which we have lived in for 18 months. I could happily stay here another year, not because I love the house so much but because I am so tired of moving. Really, really tired of moving.  My husband is unhappy in our current place and will not stop looking for another rental so he has agreed to help more with the move and I have very reluctantly agreed to go.

On top of my own moves I have helped my mother with her seven moves in the last seven and a half years. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, apparently. In the last decade there has been around 25 moves between my siblings, my two children and my mother, add our five and we are at 30 or more as a family not counting nieces and nephews. That's insanity. And a lot of boxes and tape.

My siblings seem to be staying put for now, I'm hoping my mother does, too but I'm not counting on it. My children don't require my physical help with their moves so that just leaves us. My husband thinks he will love our new place for years to come but I am too jaded now to believe that. Plus we are still at the mercy of the owner who can chose to evict us.  I am thrilled by the recent drop in home prices in Vancouver, (sorry, to those that own one) and am dreaming one day of a place of my own that doesn't have a stack of folded boxes in the basement waiting to be refilled. Someone once commented to me that I must really enjoy moving since I do it so often. I don't but I AM getting good at it. Gotta go, the tape gun is calling me.

Modern Art -Groundbreaking or Garbage?

Modern art is really a crazy trip. People scoff at it, laugh at it and always say "I could do that!"when they view it. I recently spent some time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA as it's known and all those things went through my head or passed my lips while I was there. But there is something energizing and fresh about modern art that makes you crack a smile as opposed to viewing the great masters of old with their solemn portraits, still lifes or gory battles. I'm not taking anything away from the beauty of the classics and their ability to provoke emotion, I love art of all kinds but modern art was what I was there to see.

The Coffee Pot by
Picasso

 Modern art is considered roughly the time frame from the 1860's to the 1970's so it takes in Picasso, Chagall and Klimt as well as the 60's bad boys Warhol, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Pollock and the like.  Anything newer than that is considered contemporary or post modern. The "old" modernists were just as irreverent and ground breaking in their smashing of tradition as the group from the sixties were for their time. We are so used to Picasso and his Cubism, and Dali with his melting clocks that we don't stop to realize sometimes how shocking their work was to their audience. Chagall's dreamy visions were no more appreciated by the masses when they were first seen than Warhol's can of tomato soup was.

In walking though SFMOMA's wonderful collection I was really struck by the irreverent attitude and "in your face", raised middle finger aspect of the work from the fifties to the seventies. It felt like the artists weren't even trying to be "painterly", they were just doing what they wanted and daring you to like it or buy it. It was my first time seeing one of Richard Rauschenberg's White Paintings series. It consists of three large panels, a triptych, each one painted all white. There have been many jokes made at its expense over the years.  While my brain was thinking 'now THAT I could do', I was laughing at the sheer audacity of it. It seemed to say, "I'm a painter, I painted it, its art so f*** you." And there is no point in trying to do it now, it's been done.

Andy Warhol, Self Portrait 1967

Andy Warhol was well known for his portraits, using Polaroids he took of famous people and reproducing them with screen printed colours on top. Elvis, Dolly Parton and his self- portraits are among the SFMOMA collection. He had many people help him with the work or do it under his direction further breaking down the image of what an artist was or was not. He is the biggest selling artist after Picasso so obviously he did something right, love him or hate him. The sixties were a turbulent time of great change in America and the art work of the time truly reflects that. Boundaries and barriers were coming down everywhere. It was an "anything goes" era, and the artists were the conduit for it. The massive canvases with their bold colours almost leap off the walls, demanding attention, energy made visible. They cannot be ignored.
From the powerful work of Diego Rivera to the striking and delicate colour block abstractions of Mondrian to the elegant moving mobiles of Alexander Calder, through to the polka dot cartoon images of Lichtenstein the SFMOMA has much to offer. The building itself is a thing of beauty, open spacious and  modern,  filled with light coloured, wood floors and high-ceilinged rooms. The pugnacious energy of the modern art bounces around the rooms and invites you to dare to say it's not art. I loved it but there was one piece that stood out in my mind, Untitled (1971) by Cy Twombly. A large piece that looked exactly like a blackboard that had been erased many times and then scribbled over. Standing in front of it all I could think was, "okay, Cy, now you really are having us on."

Untitled, 1971 by Cy Twombly

Forgot Password?

Passwords. A shiver just went down your spine, I can feel it.  What can be more frustrating about our fabulous connected age than the creation and remembrance of the dreaded password? Your computer crashing is worse but hopefully that doesn't happen often, while the creation and constant changing of passwords is an ongoing nightmare.

Back when online passwords first poked their ugly heads above the newly planted grass of the digital world they were simple creatures. Six to twelve letters, nothing fancy, easy to remember. Your dog's name, the street you grew up on, your favourite colour or sports team. A cousin to the four letter numerical password or PIN required for ATM's and phone banking. It was all so easy back then. Remember?  One password seemed to do the trick for all your needs and there weren't many needs. Then they started to evolve, these simple beasts, fed and watered by the growth of online shopping and all those damn loyalty cards. Collect points with us! Collect points with us! the stores and airlines screamed but first...sign up online with your new card and make up a password for your account. Everything we wanted to do online to make our lives easier, to cut down on mail or make certain jobs quicker required a password. With all the online access came the hackers and with them, identity theft and fear. The beast is now fully grown, stomping through our backyards, uprooting shrubs and scaring the pets and making us bar the door. Passwords now need to include a capital letter, a number and symbol. They can't be one you have used before, they should be changed every few months and worst of all, the beast shouts at us, its hot, stinking breath in our face...DON'T WRITE THEM DOWN!  Are you kidding me?? Ain't never gonna happen, folks.

How I think the password
beast looks

I have to write them down. I just updated a list of all my passwords and there are one hundred of them, give or take, and the list is growing as I write this. Passwords are multiplying like rabbits. The request for a password is so commonplace and never ending that I find myself quickly making up one to get through some sort of booking process or purchase and not writing it down. Oh, I'll remember, I say to myself. Nope. So now, as commonplace as the request for a log in with a password is, just as commonplace is the little phrase in parentheses (Forgot Password?) That's a double edged sword, that little phrase.  You used to be able to recover your password from a clue you gave yourself but no more. If you forget your password now we all know you get emailed a link to make a new one. The useful side of the blade. Which is great when I want access to something at that moment but it then requires me to remember the new password, hopefully write it down and even more hopefully manage to get it onto my constantly updated list. Ouch, that's the side I get cut on.

So, why not just use the "forgot Password" link every time, you ask? Why bother to write it down? Every now and again the reset link for the password doesn't work or doesn't appear in time, or at all, in your email inbox and then you're done for.  An insanely frustrating scenario is when I am trying to log in to an account with the info from my crib sheet and I receive an "incorrect username or password" message. I have to succumb to the "forgot password" link, wait for the link in my email, reset my password and then get an error code telling me something has gone wrong and I must call their 1-800 number to sort it out. Unless its something crucial I'm trying to do, at this point I usually get up and walk away.  Then there is The Loop. The place where you can't log in with the information you have and you can't seem to reset it because your email address is already being used in the system. Yes, I know, its being used... by me! Again, the only resolution is to go back to the frustrating phone calls with their lists of "options".  Listen carefully as the options have recently been changed. Argh.

The solution to all this agony would seem to be simple. Use the same password as much as possible even though it's not considered safe. I do that but not all websites take the same configuration of numbers and letters. One letter wrong and you are screwed, there is no autocorrect on passwords. Some sites demand I change my password and snottily tell me not to use one I've used before, They've come up against lazy farts like me too many times, they seem to say. Don't piss off the beast.  I use the "save password" option on my computer when I can and save them to the Cloud which leaves me more vulnerable to computer hackers. I could disconnect from the online world, use the phone more, spend my time picking through options on those awful phone systems, pay my bills at the bank with their two tellers and lines of geriatric clients, send stuff through the postal service, allowing five BUSINESS days for delivery...roll the clock back. I should quit collecting points and the freebies and perks that go with it. Get in the car and drive to the stores looking for stuff the old fashioned way. That might solve the problem but I can't do that. I love my online world and its not going away any time soon.  

 An article posted recently on the site Gigaom.com , tackles the subject of passwords and everyone's hatred of them from the user as well as the tech end. Passwords are on their way out, to be replaced by facial, eye, voice and fingerprint recognition.  Until that happens or the apocalypse comes and all the computer systems crash you will find me updating my list, cursing my memory and listening closely to the options that have changed.... with one eye on the beast.

Obsessive/Compulsive or Organized/Committed?

Sitting in a restaurant waiting for our food to arrive I watch a couple at another table get their meals placed in front of them.  A perfectly normal looking pair of diners, husband and wife perhaps, mid-forties, dressed up for their pleasant evening out. The wife picks up her cutlery and begins to  eat while her husband pulls a tiny tape measure out of his pocket and proceeds to measure his food. Nose just inches from his plate he carefully measures each item.... meat, potatoes, veg.  He doesn't write anything down, just measures. The little tape zips back and forth, out and in over his plate and cutlery, everything accounted for.  His wife, obviously used to the process,  continues to calmly eat her meal. When done with the tape measure the gentleman slips it back into his pocket and picks up his knife and fork and eats his dinner, impulses fulfilled. As compulsions go this was one I hadn't seen before and it seemed perfectly harmless. His food might have gotten a little cold but no one else was bothered or inconvenienced.
Tics, habitual behaviour, compulsions, OCD, anal behaviour, there's lot of names for it. Nutty, crazy, irritating are a few more. Depends on which side of the habit you're on. We all have them, it's just that some are more obvious like the tape measure. Start asking around and you'll be surprised at the routines and habits people can't do without or if they do it leaves them irritated and anxious in some way.
I was at a Christmas office party with my husband many years ago and each of the round dining tables in the venue had a potted poinsettia on it. As I sat, bored, listening to speeches from the office bigwigs I noticed that the pot on our table had a bar code tag stuck to the side of it. I reached over and carefully peeled it off, just a small effort to make it look nicer. Something to do in my boredom. Another woman at the table observed me and snidely remarked, " a little OCD are we?"  I was stung. "No, I prefer to think of it as a little Martha Stewart", I responded.  Just depends which side of the moment you are on. I could have easily left the tag there and not been bothered by it. OCD in my book would be getting up and removing the tag from everyone else's poinsettia pot as well. I know a woman who can't go to bed without plumping and shaping her couch cushions. Some can't go to bed without washing all the dirty dishes.  I need a glass of water beside my bed at night. My husband always rinses his mouth out with water before he brushes his teeth. Habits or compulsions? It's a fine line.

I'm not ready for one of these yet.

Talking with friends the other night I said that I had planned both my pregnancies and delivered both babies on their due dates. My friends smiled knowingly at one another and said, "OCD".  I don't know how you can make your babies come out on schedule because of your own compulsion but I just knew I was tired of waiting and told them to get on with it. I prefer to believe I'm just good at observing deadlines. There are no routines I have that are so fixed that something couldn't be changed and not upset me, I don't need to wash my hands all the time, or touch a group of objects in a particular order. My house is generally a bit untidy day to day, ironing not done, bed not made, dirty dishes can, unfortunately, sit on the counters without making me uncomfortable,  I don't get up or go to bed at the same time every day. But...I do find myself counting objects for no reason at times, and when someone is talking to me I will sometimes write words they say on my leg with my fingertip. As a kid I went through a time of not being able to leave the house without taking a quick drink a water, to the point here my mom thought I might be diabetic. Compulsions, habits, comforts?  Are these things a distraction tool of a mind always looking to busy itself? One person's comforting habit is another's obsessive compulsion. I guess when the compulsions and habits become dangerous or consume so much time
that they interfere with life they are signs of clinical OCD.  But otherwise, we are all in glass houses throwing stones if we think what others do is crazy and what we do is just fine. You won't catch 
me taking a measuring tape out for dinner with me anytime soon though.

Feeling Peevish? Tell Me About It...

There are still seven weeks of winter left, I'm fighting a cold and feeling peevish. So here in no particular order are my pet peeves ....this week.

The common cold. We can cure all kinds of diseases, take a baby out of the womb, operate on it and put it back in, give people organs from other people, make prosthetic limbs that respond to our nerve impulses but we can't find a cure or vaccine for the common cold! C'mon people, work a little harder on this. I know colds aren't too deadly but they cause a lot of missed work days, misery and the occasional death. I think it bears looking into.

People that repeatedly press the lock button on their car key fob when locking their car. Honk, honk, honk, honk. It doesn't get any more locked the more times you push the button, trust me on this one. Once will do. We don't need more noise pollution in this world so if you cannot resist the urge to double and triple lock your car please have the horn toot disconnected from it and then fire away. Otherwise try to have some control.

When ordering tea in a restaurant and receiving a cup of hot water and a tea bag on the side.  That's the saddest excuse for a hot tea I've seen. I will gladly take the little metal teapot with the drippy pour spout over that. Coffee bars will put the bag in the cup before the hot water but they like to use 16 ounce cups of water for a little teabag that only makes an eight ounce cup of tea. And there seems to be a whole generation of servers now that don't know what black tea is and when asked for black tea, offer up a shopping list of herbal teas without the faintest knowledge that they aren't really teas. I've basically quit ordering tea. Sigh.

Servers that come by and cheerfully ask you "how are those first few bites tasting?" while the food is still steaming on your plate, too hot to take a bite out of. It's an annoying question whether you have taken the first bites or not and usually interrupts a conversation I'm having. Don't be so insecure, assume the food is fine. Ask me if I need anything or if everything is ok but don't ask for reassurance that the food is just dandy.

Impenetrable packaging.

Drivers. Drivers in the left lane going slower than the rest of the traffic. Drivers in the HOV lane who believe it was meant as a personal racetrack. Drivers who have no clue as to how to use a roundabout. Drivers who try to sneak through on a four way stop when it's not their turn. Drivers who don't allow me to merge. By looking straight ahead and pretending I'm not there as I nose my car towards you is a bit childish. The sign says "merge", learn the meaning. That one car length you save won't make a difference to your trip.

Sizing on women's clothing. I am twenty pounds heavier than when I was in my twenties but I still wear the same size clothing, my clothes are bigger  but the size on the tag is the same. Are we so vain and so self delusional, ladies that we need to pretend we wear the same size as we get heavier?  There were no size "0" and "00" when I was younger.  The clothing industry has had to make those sizes up as they adjusted all the sizes to fit larger. I should be a size 16 now, not a 12.  To make matters worse each line of clothing sizes their goods differently which leads to having to try on an enormous amount of clothing to find a fit. I can wear from a size 10 to a 14.  I know men don't have that problem.

Charging for alterations on women's clothes but not on men's.

Yoga teachers who say really stupid stuff to try and sound all 'new agey' and ethereal. Don't tell me that I am being breathed, I'm doing the breathing, I know that.

The pool of urine men leave on the floor in front of the toilets in unisex bathrooms in restaurants. I would think the target area was big enough, guys. And while I'm on the topic, I'm hugely peevish about the women that urinate all over toilet seats in public restrooms and then leave it there for the next person.  Some of us actually sit on that seat. Thanks for that little surprise.

Anyone who rings my doorbell to try and sell me on their religion,

People who ring the doorbell and then knock or ring the doorbell again about five seconds later.  I'm not standing right beside the door all day just waiting to let you in, it might actually take ten seconds to get to the door. It's a house, after all, not a studio apartment. Hold your horses.

This is by far an incomplete list but if you have even managed to read this far I applaud you. Some of our peeves are universal but many are very personal and seem nonsensical to others. So if I made you smile or nod your head in agreement, I'm delighted and I feel less peevish already. If you have a favourite pet peeve that needs airing please leave it in the comment section at the bottom of the page on my blog site or email me it to at whatfayesaid@gmail.com. Always happy to hear from you. Time to take my cold meds.

The Third Act of Life Before the Final Curtain

I'd like to be picked up in this...
in case anyone cares

The curling script read "Forest Lawn" on the side of the pale silver hearse.  I was peeking out between the blinds of my bathroom window for my usual morning weather check when I saw it. As gaped through the slats, two people dressed in sombre black got out of the vehicle and mounted the steps of the house across the street. They knocked and were immediately let inside. Show over, I went downstairs to get my morning coffee with the new knowledge that someone on the street had just died. Those people don't show up for false alarms. The unofficial town cryer of my block soon apprised me of what had happened. A 62 year old man had died of cancer.  I didn't know the man, I've only lived on the block for 18 months and he wasn't here most of the time, but still....62.  Sobering.

Ian Brown's "Sixty"

For the last month or so I feel that I have been surrounded by the prospect of aging and the end of life. My doctor had recommended I read a book entitled "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" by  Atul Gawande. The author is an American doctor, a son of two doctors. It's a thoughtful, informative (too informative, perhaps) and honest description of our aging process and how modern medicine aids or hurts us in the end. That was my light Christmas holiday reading. At the same time I also read a book recommended by my sister, "Sixty" by Ian Brown. Brown is a Canadian journalist who decided to keep a diary from his 60th birthday to his 61st and record his thoughts on his own aging and what he saw around him. It's comic, tragic and unflinching. I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Male or female, we share much the same problems and issues with our human bodies and minds. Aging is a great leveler.  In both books the authors watched their active, interesting, very elderly fathers die. One son recorded it in great medical detail, the other as more of an emotional event. I was touched by both accounts and could identify with each of their losses.

My friends and I are all watching their parents get older and die. Many of my conversations now revolve around what is happening with our parents. Those who have already lost their parents to the great beyond can easily empathize with what is going on with those still left.  My father is gone and my mom, though healthy, is in her late eighties and is moving at the end of this month with her 90 year old partner into a retirement center. They are on my mind a great deal as I help them with their packing and concerns. This will be my mother's seventh move in the seven years since my dad died. That fact alone leaves me with a feeling that my older years may not be ones of peace and contentment but rather a searching for something I have lost. If I even make it to her age.

"Gentle Into This Good Night"
original art by Megan Podwin

I have believed for a while now that my arrogant Baby Boom generation is not going to live as long as we think we will. Our parents are from a generation in which so many have benefited from modern medicine and are living into their eighties and nineties. Do we think we will do the same? Will medicine save us from ourselves? As humans our lifespan seems to have stalled out, the oldest age reached is not getting any older. It is still very rare to see someone live past 105, let alone 115, despite medical intervention.  Our bodies do give out.  My generation has abused itself with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, fast food, obesity, sedentary lifestyle and stress. Unless the aliens come to help out with their space age technology we will be, and already are, dying off. With assisted suicide becoming a reality in Canada I'm not sure that every Boomer will even choose to live out their years as those before us might have done.

Even though I am attempting to be 'ageless' those around me seem to be moving into their sixties and talking of retirement, of a loss of excitement with life, a feeling of closing doors, regrets.  No more big firsts ahead, so much of life is behind, not in front.  Ian Brown points out in his book that if we can expect to live to 85 then the span from 60 to 85 is as great as the span from 30 to 55. Who can't look back on that space of time and not feel that a great deal went on?  I believe we can still experience many "firsts", we just need to redefine them. There will never again be a first love, a first job, a first home purchased or a first baby born to me. That doesn't dismay me. I envy my children their beautiful youth but am well aware I had mine and that I enjoyed it. There are no 'do overs', that is not what I'm after. I may not be quite as energetic or as physically strong as I was but I am smarter, wiser and less foolhardy than when I was younger and I'm still curious, still interested and still hoping for more.
A friend of mine has a mantra, "this is as good as it gets" to help with her acceptance of where she is in life.  I dislike that phrase because I think there is the possibility of many things out there that I cannot even imagine yet that may prove to make life better next year than it is right now, at least for the next two decades. Life after eighty appears to be more problematic according to the reading I just did.  January has been a month of reflection and learning about aging and I am internalizing that and moving forward with positivity.  As an antidote,  I'm currently reading Blogging for Dummies and the latest novel from Alan Bradley, starring  his eleven year old fictional sleuth Flavia deLuce. Flavia puts me in touch with my eleven year old self who fell in love with stories of plucky children in England. They were a favourite escape of mine as a young girl and they still are, I guess.
 My grandmother, as she was nearing the end of her 93 years here, told my mom , "we just have to live it out until it's done". None of us knows when that will be so here's to living it out every day and finding our new set of "firsts" for the decades to come.

"Whereabouts Unknown"
original art by Megan Podwin