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Finding well-being through travel and books. |
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Hello and welcome! I have two great passions in life. The first one is travel. After a series of life-changing events, my husband and I decided to spend the kids’ inheritance and see as much of the world as possible (I’m still bitter about Damascus). Our bible? A Thousand Places to See Before You Die. Please join us on our adventures seeing new places, meeting fascinating people and trying new, exciting, and sometimes just plain weird, food. My second great passion is books. Reading expands my interior world in the same way travel expands my external one. And, books are a great way to armchair travel - not only through distance but through time as well. My tastes are eclectic, so we’ll be looking at a wide range of writing in a possibly haphazard fashion. Come along for the ride! My best, Kirsten ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
| Today is my wedding anniversary and after all that has happened this past week, we completely forgot about it until late last night. We have to go to a business Christmas party tonight so an intimate dinner is not in the cards. So we looked at each other, smiled a little wryly, and said, “oh well, the important thing is we’re still together.” We’re going away over Christmas. That is our wedding and Christmas presents to each other. In the spirit of momentous personal events/milestones, Cindy has picked yet another timely blogging prompt. Your very last meal ever - what would it be and with whom? I love food, so picking a menu is tricky, there is so much to choose from! So let’s start with the people. I thought at first that I’d want everybody I cared about - friends, family … all the usual suspects who cram around my holiday table. I finally decided I’d want it to be more intimately my immediate family, my husband and children. And the children would attend only for the first two courses. At dessert, I would want it to be just my husband and I so we could say all those final things we needed to say to each other (I get a week for this last meal, right?  )Now, let’s talk about the menu. To start: a glass of champagne and some gorgeous nuts – cashews, almonds, and walnuts. Starter: Field mushroom soup Main: Duck breast, with a cherry sauce, greens of some sort and hot, fresh bread. A big red wine to go with it like an Amarone, Tignanello, or Solaia. Dessert: My Fire and Snow Brownies (recipe is in my portfolio) with Vin Santo. In the end though, all I would really want was to spend it with my husband. A boiled egg and toast would be just as good as the above if we ate together, occasionally holding hands and speaking all those soft words that need saying over, and over, and over again. This is the season of Fabulous Feasts. Many food items have sharp personal memories attached (decorating Christmas cookies with the children/your parents, the year the puppy stole the cooling stolen from the table, and so on). How many of them are meaningful to you? |
| Today’s blog prompt: Write about a holiday in which things just did not go as planned. December 17, 2009 I flew down to Chihuahua Mexico for one day to go to a Christmas party. My husband was the CEO of a Canadian company with Mexican operations and I went down to support him. The party was very nice and my husband made a lovely speech, thanking his beloved wife for coming with him. His beloved wife wasn’t enjoying herself much though. I was too worried about the dinner they were hosting Christmas Eve for fourteen people, all of whom seemed to have different dietary requirements. So while mixing with the staff, half my mind was still fretting about what sort of a menu I could put together that would accommodate various vegetarians, piscetarians, lactose intolerant, can’t eat onions, and so on and on and on. We left the party early, by about eleven because we had an early morning flight back to Canada. Our driver was dead sober. There were four of us in the vehicle travelling at a moderate speed on good roads. A black SUV suddenly broke out from the oncoming traffic at high speed and started weaving towards us. He hit us head on at about 60 miles/hr. My neck snapped. The EMS got to us within ten minutes. We were so close to the station I think they probably heard the crash. They got us to the nearest hospital and we were X-Rayed. They ran me through a CT scanner. Then they had a huddled conversation with my husband. Finally, they tried to put me through a MRI. I am highly claustrophobic, was exhausted from being awake almost 24 hours at this point, in shock and in pain. I was losing power in my arms. To add insult to injury they had cut me out of my favourite cocktail dress. At this point I did not behave well. Then they told me what was wrong. I had broken and dislocated my C5 vertebrate. If I did not have surgery immediately, I would never have to worry about Christmas Eve dinner again. By this time the neurosurgeon had arrived from Mexico City and he and the orthopod took me straight into the OR. When I woke up the first thing I did was to thank God that I woke up, then I checked if I could move my hands and feet. Miracles of miracles they had done a brilliant job (ably assisted with divine power, I swear to this day) and I was airlifted out of that hospital four days later. We still had Christmas Eve dinner. Everybody wanted to come and we so desperately wanted to see everyone we loved. All the guests brought food. I didn’t have to do anything except smile and watch the walls as they gently breathed (yes the pain pills were that good!). I will never stress about the menu again. Today I am perfectly fine. I have a thin scar at the base of my throat where they went in to do the repairs and I can never have another MRI because I now have a metal plate in my neck .This was the year I learned the true meaning of Christmas. Grace, love and family. |
| After a week of scrambling to organize a funeral, travel, accommodation, meals, and transportation (planes, trains and automobiles), sanity finally descended today when the last two family members departed. A death always prompts reflection on such topics as: What have I done with my life? Where am I going next? What is still left for me to do? What sort of legacy do I wish to leave behind? So today’s prompt for the Blogging Circle was timely. Pretend a time machine sends you a letter from your future self—ten or twenty or thirty years from now. What will that letter say? Write it. December 12, 2022 Dear Kirhy, It’s been another exciting ten years, hasn’t it? It is as though your entire life before that was preparing you for the burst of creativity you experienced during the last ten. You finally started to pull it all together in your writing: talent, technique, discipline and a truly inspirational and granite solid support group. There was nothing like holding that first book in your hands, was there? There it was - solidly real, and full of pages that you wrote. It was almost as good as holding your firstborn child. It helped that many other people loved it too! . Then you wrote the sequel. But really, the books are simply concrete evidence of a successful internal journey. It was ten years ago that you finally gave up comparing yourself to others and finding yourself wanting. It was ten years ago you stopped punishing yourself with stories you told yourself in your head – worries, fears, imaginings that weren’t real – all imaginary conversations only you were holding. But how much energy those worries, fears and imaginings sucked out of you! Rereading Byron Katie really helped, as did actually doing the exercises in Martha Beck’s new book. Although, truly it was a simple as remembering the wisdom of the Buddha – all suffering is created in the mind. Your biggest accomplishment was ceasing to worry about ~M~. Those problems were not your problems. Yes, I do realize it is easy now to say to ~M~, ”I wouldn’t have worried so much if I had known how well things were going to turn out for you” and much harder when you had to actually step away and let the fledgling fly. That’s it for now, sweetie, Be strong. Be brave. Write. All my love, Kirhyanna. |
| This has been a tough week. My father-in-law died suddenly last Monday and we have all been scrambling ever since. The term ‘suddenly’ might be a bit misleading. He was eighty-four, had had Alzheimer’s for the past five years and was gradually fading away over the past year. So, it wasn’t entirely unexpected, but my husband’s brother and his wife had seen him Sunday and, although he wasn’t feeling all that great, there was no sense of urgency. He got into trouble at noon on Monday and died by three-thirty. The only one who made it to say goodbye was my husband’s sister. They phoned her and said he wasn’t doing too well. She got to the nursing home as fast as she could, my father-in-law held her hand, shed a tear and died. He was gone five minutes after she arrived. He held on until one of his children came. Events like this prompt the big questions: What happens when we die? Where do we go? And, of course, today’s blogging prompt: Why do you think you were born into this world? I think we are born into this world because we have made an agreement in our spiritual life to take physical form to learn certain lessons that help our spirits to develop and grow. Every soul is going to have different lessons to learn but I believe one common one is that we all have to learn to love more perfectly, both others and ourselves. It’s almost impossible to love others deeply and unselfishly without loving oneself first. We have been given a road map in the lessons taught by the great spiritual masters: Buddha, Jesus Christ, Lao Tzu, and Mohammed, to name the big ones (and if I’ve forgotten anyone, I apologize in advance. Also, this list is not in order of perceived importance – it is alphabetical). If we learn the agreed upon lesson in this life we have a chance to move on and learn new ones in the next. If we don’t, it’s wash, rinse and repeat. If you see spiritual existence as a upward spiral, with spiritual perfection the ultimate goal at the top, with each physical life we have the opportunity to move up the spiral, stay in the same place, or, move downwards if we really mess it up. So … that’s the short form of my thinking on today’s prompt. I’d love to hear your thoughts. This is one of the best possible subjects to discuss. |
| Rant of the day: This has nothing to do with gifts, but I need to get it off my chest before moving on … I have been feeling absolutely crappy for the last two days, my head has been fuzzy, I’ve been tired, unable to keep a thought in my head or string two coherent sentences together. This morning, my beloved husband tells me – um, I bought decaffeinated espresso – and I’ve been drinking it since Tuesday! What is the point of decaffeinated espresso? Why would you make it? Why would you buy it? “I never thought to read the label” is not an excuse! As you can probably tell, I’m totally hyped-up on caffeine now, so on with today’s prompt to the Blogging Circle of Friends: If you could give any gift in the world, what would you give and to whom? I thought long and hard about this one today – I hate to be restricted to one person, one gift – there are a lot of people whose financial and/or health burdens I would love to be able to ease. If I could wave a wand and give the world a gift, that gift would be that every single person had their basic needs met: ease of breath, food, water, clothing, security of person, and shelter. If I have to select just one person, it would be the gift of self-discipline (specifically the gift of the determination to stick to something even when the going gets tough) for ~M~. Gift giving is getting harder and harder. My father phoned me the other day and said, “I have everything I need, can we just skip the presents this year?” I’m personally all for it. I’ll give him the gift of time instead, my time. I’ll fly out west and visit my parents one extra visit this year (lucky them ).Is anyone else having trouble with gift giving this year? How have you solved it? Best ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** "if you're feeling blue- try painting yourself a different color." ~Hannah Cheatam, Age 8 "Invalid Item"  "Invalid Item" |
| The prompt given to the Blogging Circle of Friends today was What is your greatest regret? You cannot change the past, but if you could, what would you do differently? When I first read it, I thought – gee, where to start? Marrying the wrong man? Twice! Getting off on the wrong career track – for 20 years! Not getting paid what I should have? Any of those would probably qualify. But, on a three hour drive back to the big smoke I had a chance to go a bit deeper, into what is perhaps the root cause. What I saw both disturbed and pleased me. What disturbed me was that I clearly saw that I found myself in those situations because I felt I wasn’t worth more. And that had made me into a chronic runner. I might make excuses that I needed to do what I did for the sake of others, but the blunt truth was that I would do anything to avoid confrontation. I had shown I was unable to withstand entreaties that were blatantly unreasonable and selfish. I lacked the courage of my own convictions. I was afraid of other people’s anger. I tried to remember an occasion when I had stood up for myself and not caved under pressure. I tried to muster an argument in my own defense, but I had to admit it, I was at heart a coward. This was most manifestly egregious when my previous marriage imploded just over fourteen years ago. We were living in Chile, my then husband and I and our ten-year old daughter. I had to leave but he wouldn’t let me take her with me. I spent two years travelling back and forth to Chile to see her before I could get her back to Canada. It scarred her, although I believe she is better now, and if only I had dug my heels in it might far easier for her. I said at the beginning, though, that what I saw both disturbed and pleased me. I am pleased to report that, despite my previous mistakes, I wouldn’t change a thing in my current life. I have learned to stand up for myself and say, ‘this far and no farther, buckwheat’. I have a wonderful family and I greet each day with pleasure. If I had done one thing differently in the past, one thing, large or small, would I be where I am today? |
| I’m back in the blogging saddle again after a rather longer-than-expected hiatus as I fell down the deep dark rabbit hole that is National Novel Writing Month (affectionately known as NaNo). NaNo is an annual marathon for writers held every November. The challenge is to write 50,000 words of a complete novel in 30 days. That’s 1,667 words per day… every single day! I’m please to say that, after much hair pulling, wailing and gnashing of teeth, I’ve had a second successful NaNo year. Successful in that I now have almost 80,000 words and most of them make sense. The story has a beginning, middle, and end and some characters that I either really love or really want to slap.  .It doesn’t mean I have a publishable novel yet- not by a long shot. But, it’s a good start! This year was much easier than last year because Just before NaNo started I took the Exploratory Writing Workshop taught by percy goodfellow  . This is one of a number of worthwhile, and very affordable, courses offered by the New Horizons Academy on the WDC site and it gave me the tools and structure I needed to achieve my goal.
I also joined the NaNo-A-Thon, organized by Jaeff | KBtW of the Free Folk  , drummed up some sponsors (proceeds towards worthwhile WDC groups), and posted my word count on the NaNo counter every day. Ever competitive, that daily check-in to see how I was doing against everyone else was another strong impetus to keep my word count up!Now my task is to finish the book and get back into some semblance of a normal life. My ever-loving husband has been wonderful – waving me off every morning as I headed up to the loft to write and making dinner every night. How could one not succeed with support like that? |
| He was the best of dogs, and he lived a long and happy life. After almost fourteen years of travelling and meeting interesting smells and people, my beloved Ming succumbed to a brief, final illness. Yesterday my beautiful, stubborn, opinionated chow began to have difficulty breathing. He refused to eat his favorite dog food, but as this was not an unusual occurrence this, in itself, didn’t worry us unduly. We had been worried about his health, but, surprisingly, his regular vet gave him a clean bill of health the previous day. Yesterday the vet at the emergency clinic told us differently. She said that he was in critical condition and took the x-rays required for a diagnosis of his current condition. Was she discovered was distressing. He had fluid in his lungs, heart failure, and a large mass in his chest. Although desperately ill, Ming still fought to breathe. My husband and I anxiously listened to the vet giving us her prognosis. We still hoped for the best. However, to our shock, she recommended immediate euthanasia. No, I thought, he was just given the all-clear yesterday! I needed to make a decision as soon as possible. It was the kind and humane thing to do. Fortunately, the vet, her staff, and my wonderful husband [19] supported me in this awful moment. Ming was suffering, and he wasn’t going to get better. My heart was cracking open with grief. However, as the vet said, I believe in prolonging life not prolonging death. I quickly signed the consent form before burying my hands and face one last time in his beautiful fur. It was the work of an instant, the needle went in. I tried to be brave. I had held it together thus far. We said our good-byes and gave final pats. Then it was over. To think of Ming’s life only in terms of the horrors of last night is tempting now. However, it is far better to remember him happy and healthy. He was such a wonderful dog. I will miss him very much. |
| I love walking, and one of the advantages to being out in the country is the wonderful lanes we have for glorious fall walks. Last spring, a young friend of mine told me that I should be using MBT shoes while I was out and about. https://http:www.mbt.com These shoes have been developed to activate your body while standing and walking. A friend of hers was using them to run all over the city and she now had abs of steel. Did I want abs of steel? But of course! That was when she warned me they were rather, to put it plainly, ugly. But who sees me out in the country? I bought a pair, and they make you walk with a curious rocking motion, but yes, you can feel muscles working in the front all the way up to the diaphragm, and in the back, right up to the midline. I have worked my way up from a 2 mile walk to today when I did almost 6 miles, up and down hills. Next up - YogaToes. http://www.yogapro.com/products/YogaToes.html Apparently they help with bunions, hammertoes and all round general foot health. I have a glorious set of bunions, the legacy of twenty years of ballet coupled with twenty years of stilettos. I am also pain averse and I've heard that bunion surgery is excruciatingly painful. When I bought the MBT's the lady said they had cured her bunions, but that she had also used these YogaToes. Then I saw a reference to them in Vogue this month (so they must be good - right?). While I'm a little skeptical about the hype, I've ordered a pair in a fetching sapphire blue and I'll keep an open mind. |
| I was listening to a radio interview this morning with Emma Koenig, who has a blog called F&#k! I’m in my twenties. It’s a paean to the angst suffered by the millennial generation particularly around jobs, relationships and just generally feeling that life hasn’t worked out so far the way it was supposed to. http://f***iminmy20s.tumblr.com/ She had some very valid points. Relationships seem to be very difficult for young people. Is it the technology? Also the job situation is very different from when I graduated. Although I graduated in the early ‘80’s at the beginning of a serious recession (and 22% interest rates), there were a lot of jobs that simply don’t exist anymore. Some because of technology, and some because of outsourcing, but what happened to all of those entry level jobs that the big consumer companies used to have. What happened to being able to learn ‘on the job’? Nowadays it seems the kids either aren’t educated enough, educated in things that aren’t very useful, or are over-educated. The blog has snagged Emma a book deal and possibly a TV show. So hers was an innovative and largely unintended solution to her problem. What other creative ways can the twenty somethings use to create more successful lives for themselves? |
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