I really don't have much to say in this post. It exists simply because I wanted to restart my blog on January 1, which meant that I needed to have a January 2 post, too. Therefore, there is no rhyme or reason to the contents of this post (and this is different how, you're wondering?) but these are just a few things that popped into my mind over the past few weeks and I wanted to share them with you. So set your GPS for Fort Lauderdale...we'll get there, eventually, via the most rambling route ever.
My favorites are the mandelas...
...but I like anything colorful (and enjoy applying the various filters that are available for free).
I think this was done during a Merlot-fueled evening ;-)
“She got in!” cried Roberta like a tearful parent reading an Ivy League
acceptance letter. My sister would still be jumping for joy if there
hadn’t been a move to coordinate. If you’d ever seen Mom’s 300-plus snowman
collection, you’d know that was no easy feat.
“You can’t take everything with you,” Roberta reprimanded, channeling Mom’s
famous words uttered in 1978 shortly before she and my dad rented a U-Haul the
size of a horse trailer to get Roberta’s clothes to campus. How soon these kids
forget.
Living 500 miles away, I escaped the heavy labor, but I felt the same way at
Mom’s move-in as I did after my kids’ dorm drop-offs. True, there wasn’t the
possibility of a bad roommate, but what if Mom hated her neighbors? What if she
got homesick and wanted to drop out? Before we could get much deeper into our
obsessions, Mom did what most happy college students do—she made herself
scarce. The woman who was always at home went MIA for the right reason: a
thriving social life. Before the move, when she didn’t answer the phone, we’d
panic. Now it’s a good bet she’s on the run with her buddies or hanging out on
the porch, which operates a lot like a student union.
Despite her new dining adventures, there’s been no freshman 15 for the woman
with a senior metabolism. In fact, she’s down a few pounds. Proud, perplexed
and a little jealous, I tried to figure out how you could drop a size while
living in a dormlike environment. Then I found out about the weigh-ins
and exercise classes. And of course there’s the fact that most residents
are asleep by 10 p.m., so there’s no one to help you rationalize the need for a
late-night pizza delivery.
Mom now proudly admits that one of the best things she ever did was downsize
to make this big move. She is living proof that happiness isn’t about how many
rooms of stuff you have. I think that’s because most of our great memories
don’t take up much space, which means there’s plenty of room for making new
ones.
My sister Roberta tears up when she thinks about how happy Mom is now. We know
transitions aren’t always this seamless. I like to think of this chapter of
Mom’s life as the perfect sequel. She graduated fourth in her high school class
but didn’t go to college because her family couldn’t afford it. Now it’s her
turn to play coed and she’s having the time of her life. She’s down a few
snowmen, but she’s collecting friends instead.
Nancy Berk, Ph.D., is author of College Bound and
Gagged: How to Help
Your Kid Get into a Great College Without Losing Your Savings, Your Relationship, or Your Mind
First, I've previously mentioned www.Bookbub.com, but I really have to say again how much I've been enjoying it. On those cold nights at home when I was in bed under two down comforters by 8pm, I did ten times more reading than I did during all those sea days on the Pacific Princess combined, and made my way through several of the free ebooks I'd "purchased" through Bookbub. It's a good thing, but if you subscribe to it, just be certain that your genre preferences are correctly recorded. I was getting all sorts of offers for free bodice-ripping romances while I was on the Pacific Princess and didn't have enough internet 'oomph' to get that corrected. Of course I still bought the bodice-ripping romances (they were free!); I simply resigned myself to tolerating all the bare-chested, six-packed men on the book covers until I got home. Now I'm hooked up with bestsellers and literary fiction and 'cozy mysteries', which I imagine are a lot like drinking a cup of tea while watching Murder She Wrote. Honestly, that's more my speed. ;-)
Also a good thing, and a time suck if ever there was one, is the app called Colorfy. I know I am not alone in getting into the adult coloring book genre, and having the book and the 'pens' contained on the same iPad that holds all my other personal entertainment is a mighty convenient thing for travel. Unless you subscribe to the premium plan, which provides more coloring pages and colors, it's free, too.
Source: Colorfy app for iOS
Maybe that I've been so busy looking at book covers and coloring and baking explains why it took until last night for me to upload almost 200 new and/or better quality photos to the blog posts since last September. I promise I didn't get any more verbose in them, but if you enjoy my photos (again, it's frequent photography, not fine photography), you might want to just skim through the posts from our Polynesian season. I cannot tell you (the English language lacks words with enough passion) how much easier it was to upload photos to the blog from home over high speed wifi. Instead of uploading one at a time, taking 15 minutes for each pic, I was uploading 15 at a time, in one minute. It was a wonderful thing.
I think that we have possibly been so caught up with the holidays that it suddenly hit us yesterday afternoon that we're leaving again. Fueled by a bout of sudden nervous energy, neither one of us could sit still, and took advantage of every commercial break and half time during the college bowl games (which, frankly, lacked any suspense) to do some final packing and cleaning (and it was major cleaning, too, like the refrigerator drawers and shower doors and the washing machine dispenser. Where did that motivation come from?). In between the last two games of the day, we once again moved the few pieces of outdoor furniture from the deck back into the family room. We had moved them to the deck when we first got home, more to free up space than anything else. It hasn't exactly been BBQ weather around here.
Then, last night, when we had run out of football to watch, I multitasked by coloring my hair and giving myself a pedicure and counting out pills to pack, all at the same time, staying up until after midnight to finish. And it occurred to me, while I was taking care of those things, that this is the first time in recent memory when getting ready for a cruise didn't involve power tools and ladders. This must be what it's like for normal people. It's very nice!
We are once again taking four large suitcases for the second part of our winter at sea, and this was a very heated topic for a few hours yesterday. G wanted to take four 35 pound suitcases instead of three 47 pound suitcases; I was convinced we had cut back enough on what we were taking to get by with three 40 pound suitcases. But then we added my walking sticks and three floats and threw in the fins and wetsuits we were going to leave at home and...well, in no time at all, we were needing the fourth suitcase. :-(
As for how long we'll be cruising...I have no idea, and that's the truth. We have flights booked on nine different days to come home. Really. And it's not like in prior years where we booked cruises for months, but then had the option of cancelling some later cruises and coming home early. This year we have flights to come home long after we have cruises booked. And why not? Using Southwest points, they're fully refundable. And we may be able to be like those lucky Florida residents and take advantage of some deals after final payment. We're even willing to move around between ships and cruise lines. So we might be home in two weeks or two months.
We'll be starting out on our second home, the Emerald Princess. I pulled out our cruising history spreadsheet; we have done 41 cruises for 410 nights on the Emerald Princess, and we've loved every one of them. This is not new territory for us...except it kind of is. The Emerald just returned from dry dock in December, and there were some major changes made during it. Some of them I'm looking forward to (new beds!), others I'm impartial about and still others might not be improvements at all. Reviews are definitely mixed, but that only means I need to experience it to decide for myself. And the Emerald Princess is not returning to the Caribbean after it goes to Europe for the summer; instead it's going to spend next winter in Australia (except it will be their summer). We simply couldn't let it leave without saying an extended goodbye. Will it be 'goodbye, we'll miss you' or 'goodbye and good riddance'? We'll soon find out...
We have a long day tomorrow, flying to Fort Lauderdale on the Sunday after the holidays. (What were we thinking?) But, if all goes well, we'll arrive at the Embassy Suites on 17th Street in time for the manager's happy hour. Good friends Suzan and Greg, who are joining us for a few cruises, will be staying there, too, and I cannot wait to see them. Of course, with all the texting Suzan and I have done since I got home. we'll likely have nothing left to talk about.
Right...
And, finally, after I mentioned Mom's change of address in my first post last September, many people emailed me sharing their own experiences with the same sort of parental adjustments, or telling me that they were facing the exact same transition in the near future. Having this kinship is very comforting. I tell people that my friends and I are at an age where we don't have to ask each other how we're doing...we ask how our parents are doing, because that tells us the former, too.
Well, Mom included a clipping of an article from Parade Magazine about this now-familiar experience in her Christmas card to us. She said she saw herself in it (the snowmen collection, perhaps, or the busy social life?), and I certainly could relate to it, too ("She got in!!!" and "You can't take everything with you"). If you are someone at this same stage of life (either the senior or the junior participant), maybe this will remind you that you are not in it alone.
My Mother the Coed by Dr. Nancy Berk
When my mother agreed to shed the responsibilities of a
four-bedroom home for a senior housing opportunity, I knew she’d love the
maintenance-free lifestyle, but worried that she’d feel the stigma of
aging in an environment that welcomed a highly specific age bracket. My
siblings and I held our breath as we waited to see if Mom, 78, was accepted. I
should have known this was going to be a college déjà vu experience when she
landed on the wait list of her favorite place, but it wasn’t until I got the
phone call that it hit me.
Your Kid Get into a Great College Without Losing Your Savings, Your Relationship, or Your Mind