A Little Enlightenment and a New Bookshop - Hallelujah!

(Channeling Estelle Getty) Picture it. It's earlier today. I'm sitting at The Vault, drinking a half-caf Americano, eating a delicious, fluffy spinach & feta quiche, and reading Natalie Goldberg's Long Quiet Highway -- all at the same time. Across the table, another book lies waiting -- but that's another story.

On the other hand, maybe I should tell you about that first.

I've been reading on Facebook and Twitter (courtesy of poet Kim Goldberg - no relation to Natalie!) that there's a new indy bookshop here in Nanaimo, and today (Saturday) is my day to check it out, because I don't have to be at work until one o'clock. Off I go to Heritage Mews, where I find Back Page Books nestled neatly into the mews, almost directly across from Mad About Ewe, the world's greatest yarn shop. Ignoring the siren call of the Ewe, I walk into the bookshop, where another kind of temptation (or six) awaits me. Before I even have a chance to check out the books, I see a huge tray of goodies sitting on a coffee table. There are cookies, carrot cake, brownies -- oh, all sorts of temptations. I ignore them, too (although I'm saying to myself Hmmmm. This seems to be my kind of shop!) and I proceed to look around at the books. There is a children's section right at the front of the shop. I regret having bought my grandchildren's Christmas books at Chapters before I heard about Back Page. I note the selection anyway, for future reference. Then I spot Poetry and head straight for it. A gently-read copy of Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth (bilingual) catches my eye. I take it from the shelf and retire to one of several easy chairs scattered around the room, (The whole shop is only about a room and a half big) where I sit and read a poem before I finish my inspection of the books. There is a Fiction section, and Cookbooks, and I forget what else, but I've got my Neruda book , so I take it to the till, where I introduce myself to Richard, the proprietor, and let him know that he's being talked about in cyberspace. He is delighted to hear it.

After running a couple of errands, I fetch up at The Vault, where I order my coffee and quiche, sit down, and try to do four things at once. About halfway through my coffee, a third of the way through the quiche, I hear a voice (mine) in my head. It says:

You know, you don't have to do everything at once.

Shazam! It's like a bolt of lightning. No wonder I'm stressed out. I'm trying to live Sandra's Life: The Oxford Compact Version -- everything compressed into a space never meant to contain so much -- impossible to lift, much less read, but very, very full. I put my pen down, shove Natalie Goldberg to the other side of the table, turn away from Pablo Neruda, and concentrate on my quiche. It's good. So is the coffee, which I drink afterward. Then it's time to go to work, so I pack everything up and proceed to spend the next few hours in frantic activity.

Here I am now. It's nine o'clock in the evening. I'm listening to Mendelssohn and writing this post for the second time, because Blogger ate my first attempt. Somehow I worked on it for nearly an hour, and all I had to show for it was a single letter (s) on the page. I think it stood for the "s" word. If it didn't, it should have. I have to get up at 4:45 AM, so I guess I had better be going to sleep soon. Tomorrow I'll copy one of the Neruda poems into my sidebar. Meanwhile, I've had a great day. Now, if only that Aha! moment I had this afternoon would stick around. Sometimes I feel like the Tasmanian Devil from the old Looney Tunes cartoons.

Friday Photo Shootout - Weather

I went to the Friday Photo Shootout site to make an announcement. I wanted to confess/complain that when I was taking photos at the Christmas party the other night, my camera started making a strange sound. Let's see. It was something like this:  "Erk. Erk. Erk. Erk. Erk."  Whenever I turned the camera on or off, that's what it would say. My friend Jane, who was also at the party, suggested that perhaps I should stop turning the camera on and off, because I might be exacerbating the problem by doing so, That made sense. I turned the camera off, and I haven't turned it on since. The problem seems to involve the mechanism for poking the lens unit out of the front of the camera. I guess this is when I say"Drat! I did not buy the extended warranty."

So the upshot of this is that I don't have a camera anymore, at least not for the moment. That makes posting to FFS more than a little problematic.

Then I noticed that I did in fact have a weather-related photo in my archives. Ta-da! The weather that I photographed is not the weather we have today, but it is weather. Rainy weather, to be exact - the kind of weather we expect to have here on Vancouver Island in the winter. What we actually have is freezing weather. I would like the rain back, please. And the warmth to go with it.

Anyway, it was a stroke of good luck to find a weather-related photo, but unless it happens that the FFS topics for the next few weeks happen to fit the contents of my archive, I shall be Photoless in Blogland. I shall try to either repair or replace my camera before I head to Hawaii in mid-January, because I have a feeling I'm going to want to take a picture or two when I'm there. ;>)

To see more Friday Photo Shootout posts, please click on the big black camera on my sidebar.

Drive-by posting

You know, I was about to apologize for not being around and explain that, it being the season, I'm mostly at work and only able to get online when I'm on the verge of falling asleep, but really, we're all in that state right now, aren't we? Therefore, I would like to propose an amendment to the Christmas Act whereby Christmas is to be celebrated on January 25 by people whose names begin with A-D, February 25 by those whose names begin with E-H, etc., to spread the stress out a little. I find that with every passing year, I am more inclined to yell "BAH, HUMBUG!" and retire to my room for the duration.

On the other hand, there are parts of the holiday that do warm my heart - like the Kings College Cambridge music, and my three-year-old granddaughter, who said to her mother today "It's a surprise, but you're getting a new mug for Christmas, because your old one has a chipmunk on it."

 

When she could stop laughing, her mom said "Ah, that's a chip, not a chipmunk." I suspect that this Christmas present will be one that she remembers even when her children have grown up and left home.

So once a day, every day, I will sit and calm myself and remember that there are wonderful memories tied to this season -- both the memories I have from the past, and the ones yet to be made.

Chipmunk clip art courtesy of Webweaver.