intertext

So, I'm 54 years old today! I can't believe that I used to hate birthdays, because I never really celebrated them but always felt like I should be self-consciously "happy" all day long. The last few have been so much fun, entirely because I have this delightful group of friends who help me to celebrate. Not to mention the legions of greetings here and on Facebook, which help to make the day special.

The major celebrations were last night. I joined lidocafe, superfoo, marri, kp, Eli, Eli's girlfriend Marinya, and Greg for extremely good Chinese food. We ordered much too much, but that meant that many of us left with boxes of leftovers for lunch today or future dinners. I was given beautiful cards and a book token (yay!!) and a gorgeous aquamarine scarf and a book I've been wanting to read and some nice smelly things to bathe with (and the promise of a hand-made toque from Eli, who KNITS, beautifully, among his many other talents).

Then Eli and lidocafe and I went a couple of blocks down the road to the Alex Goolden Hall to hear Great Lake Swimmers, and they were AWESOME. Here's a sample




And this evening, kp is cooking me dinner!

One of my hidden talents is that I can make an extremely good cheese and spinach souffle from scratch, without a recipe. This evening, a friend came over to meet Tabitha and stayed for dinner, so I made said souffle and also a salad with pear and walnuts, and we had some white wine from the fridge. It was all extremely good.

So, now you know where to come if you would like someone to make you a souffle :)

The big news - I got to meet classics_cat!! She's one of my first and oldest LJ friends, and it was SO delightful to meet her today. She was both what I expected and not what I expected, all in good ways :) It was great to get pulled into one of the firmest and most sincere hugs I've experienced in a while. But I hope she's not annoyed with me for insisting on paying for lunch - after all, I invited her, and pulled her away from a free one at the UVic colloquium she was attending. It was a very delicious lunch at "The Little Thai Place" near both UVic and Camosun. But, the best part was just getting to meet an LJ peep for real, and hoping that we'll do it again soon. I love meeting my LJ friends in RL!

Later that afternoon, I took Robinson out in the sun that was shining and met up with my old RL friends B and J for a very nice dog walk. Right now, I'm cooking a squash, corn and spinach stew that I'm going to eat fairly soon with some brown rice.

The animals are Getting Along^TM. I saw Tabitha and Robinson actually touch noses without anyone's hackles getting raised or tail getting fluffed up.

Yesterday evening, I got my hair cut and streaked and I think it looks pretty nice.

Life is Good.

nablopomo 8

(nablopomo 3) A friend from UVic asked "would you like to go play badminton"? This is not something that I'd ever considered doing, really, but I'm always up for a lark, so I agreed. We went to a drop-in session yesterday afternoon and it was GREAT fun. The irony is that my friend had to stop after one game because her neck was hurting, and I enjoyed it so much that I stayed for three. I was very tired afterwards but I feel okay today. This may become a regular thing, who knows! (I still haven't looked in my hip owner's manual to see if badminton is on the approved list; indeed I have a sneaking suspicion that it may not be...) Strangely, my hips and shoulders are pretty much okay, but my back is sore.

This is what I was doing at about 11:00 this morning



I went out kayaking today with my friend sheilap and her partner Jo. It was amazing. We put in at Esquimalt lagoon and went on about a 4 hour paddle through Esquimalt harbour. We stopped for lunch at Cole Island., a historic site that I had hitherto not known anything about. I am very very tired but extremely proud of myself that I was able to sustain that amount of activity and hold my end up in the paddling.

En route, we saw a multitude of wildlife, including ospreys hovering, looking for prey, herons, a turkey buzzard, a kingfisher, oystercatchers, Canada Geese, lots of other sea birds, seals and a deer and its faun. There is pictorial documentation ( under the cut to save bandwidth )

It was movie night (Indie 3, in preparation for Indie 4). Cohosted by Eli (of the multiple couches) and superfoo. Eli promised copious amounts of vodka and rum, which there was not. There was wine and cider and I think beer and a lot of chips and dip and a little cheese and the movie, which I don't think many of us paid a great deal of attention to, and good conversation. It devolved in the end to the Stalwarts - me, lidocafe, Eli and Greg. As all but Eli were preparing to leave at quite a late hour, Eli produced a bottle of Calvados, procured at a roadside stand near Mont St Michel, which he visited last month. This, of course, led to more conversation and reminiscences about France, and the Calvados, which was very good but very potent. Apparently lidocafe is suffering from a bad hangover today. I'm not, but I somehow managed to be not QUITE as tipsy as she and Greg were. It was fun, though. It's not exactly attempting to recapture lost youth - I wouldn't be twenty again if you paid me, although I wouldn't mind my 20-year old body - there's a certain pleasure in doing silly, youthful things from the perspective of one with more... experience. In some ways you can appreciate them more because you don't take them for granted and you've been there before so it's not risking anything. There's a certain comfort level that comes with Age. Does that make sense??

It's not over yet, but I plan to put my feet up and watch movies and maybe even go to bed early tonight, so thought I would post a few reflections.

It has been a good year. I found myself still in the process of recovery from grief and getting used to being alone after ten years of intensive care-giving. It's amazing how difficult learning to be happy can be, sometimes. I'm not always successful, but at least I'm learning to get help when I need it.

Friendships have been a delight. I have some lovely new ones, and some old casual friends are becoming much more important friends, and old friends are still there, solid as a rock. I had a vague resolution to be more social this past year, and I think I can say I've succeeded.

I went to Paris!!!!!!

I still have both my dogs, and they are still wonderful, and Cholmondeley is 14 1/2 but remarkably well, if a bit frail.

Clio-the-cat continues to keep me warm at night, relaxed in the evening, and well aware of my inferiority.

I don't do resolutions, really, but I want to lose a few pounds, get a little fitter, read more, write even more than that, and learn to be a little more - balanced - about life. Perhaps writing them here will give those wishes a bit more power.

May 2008 bring all my dear LJ friends every blessing and delight: good books, good movies, good food, good company, solace in nature, laughter, and a new season of Battlestar Galactica!!!!!

I can now sit back and look at my (almost) clean house, with tree up, Christmas supplies and pressies bought, a little baking done, and dogs bathed.

My friend kp came over on the 21st for a Solstice dinner - I made yummy curried parsnip soup and we had salad and bread and Comox Camembert cheese and Howe Sound Winter Ale and then raspberries and blueberries from the summer that I unfroze and served with creme fraiche and coffee and some of my baking.

This morning I am going to groom the dogs and then lidocafe is dropping over this afternoon.

Tomorrow my friend mkb is coming, and I'm cooking the Turkey dinner in the evening. I've had several invites to Christmas dinner on The Day, but have refused all of them - think I will spend a quiet day with the dogs, listening to music and enjoying my tree.

And old school friend is supposed to be visiting either Boxing Day or the day after, and I'm having B&J over for dinner on the 28th.

What I'm quite liking about the way Christmas is changing for me is that it is no longer The Day, but has become a whole "Christmas time" and is in fact a lot more relaxing and pleasant.

That threatening cold? It's here, in large measure. Oh well, perhaps it's a Good Thing to get it over with before term starts.

In other news, I took the daring and revolutionary (for me) step of inviting dr to my place for dinner last night. I made a really good chicken curry that was meant to have mangoes in it, but had to have papayas because there were No Mangoes at Thrifty's. It was still very good. I also made a nice salad dressed lightly with limejuice infused Olive Oil and white balsamic vinegar and a splash of actual lime juice (or reasonable facsimile - RealLime). We drank a bottle of sparkling chardonnay, which was excellent. And had a very nice evening. I didn't feel too ashamed of my shabby little house (that's the reason that inviting anyone except someone who has known me for years and years is so revolutionary for me) and the dogs behaved well and Clio the cat deigned to appear. So it was good.

This afternoon I will take dogs to meet B & J and Lucy their puppy. Otherwise, I shall sloth vigorously, using my cold as an excuse, as if I needed one (I can always sloth with abandon).

Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to see Stardust with lidocafe and her daughter, which will be fun, I'm sure.

Yesterday, I went to a memorial service for a man I'd never met. No, I haven't suddenly become one of those people who likes going to funerals; this was in my vaguely "official" capacity as still being Acting Chair of the English Dept, for the man who was to have been Chair of the Biology Dept at my college. He was two weeks into his appointment when he was diagnosed with the cancer that took his life only a few months later.

I didn't want to go, but thought to myself that two hours or so out of my Saturday afternoon wouldn't hurt me. As it happened, I probably wouldn't have been missed, but ultimately I was glad I went, because, in the way of such things, going brought me several gifts.

One gift was being witness to the celebration of a life embraced and lived as fully as seems possible. This was a man of depth and accomplishments - he travelled widely, built his own trimaran and sailed it, developed close relationships, was survived by several children. He competed in martial arts and worked to build an association of his discipline in Canada. He was a mountaineer (which made me think of countrygardener - Marty, did you know someone called Ted Davis? It wouldn't surprise me if you did). His life had been so full and rich that even though he died too soon at sixty I couldn't help but feel that he had lived a complete life that one could truly celebrate with a sense of loss of a friend and father and lover and coworker but no regret for things undone. And, of course, this made me think of my own life, and wonder what people might say at my memorial service, and whether I could share that sense of fulfillment, and to think about what I should do that I have left so far undone.

Another gift was meeting there someone from UVic, a colleague from a part of my life that I've almost forgotten: the years I spent teaching there for their community education program. She folded me into a close and warm hug, not one of those "air hugs" but a true embrace, one that both asked for and gave comfort.

The third and perhaps greatest gift was talking to my friend dr afterwards. She has recently been through a death in her own family and is having a hard time with it. She asked me about my memorial service for my mother, which brought back warm memories for me but talking about it brought us both to tears. This was a good thing, though, because although we've been friends for a long time (almost as long as I've been at the college), things have been a bit shaky between us lately and I've felt a serious risk of losing our friendship. However, our brief talk was intense and emotional but full of promise to work hard for our friendship because it was important to both of us, and I left her feeling more confident that would happen than I have for perhaps years.

I wrote that this re-connection with dr was "perhaps" the greatest gift. That is not to qualify the gift, because it was hugely important, but I think that it in fact was not the greatest. The greatest gift was being reminded that today, this moment, is all we have. That it is so desperately important and essential to appreciate what we have, and make every moment, every hour, every chance for connection and engagement with people and life as full and warm and rich as possible.