Here I am at the beginning of another ‘holiday’ season:  Halloween then Thanksgiving then Christmas then New Year’s then the Super Bowl!  This year the addition of a regular season college football game was a part of 2011′s holidays.  LSU beat Alabama to settle the question:  Who’s #1?  That LSU is #1 (at the expense of Bama) may be the highlight of my 2011 holiday season – unless, of course, the Saints make it to the Super Bowl again!   Back to the subject at hand – each year with the advent of the holiday season I begin to consider the topic of my annual Christmas letter.  Because it occured to me that I’m still filled with hope at the tender age of 74, that hope might be a good subject for my holiday message.  Then, of course, I began to think about hope in my daily life and how hope brightens everything.  So, I’ll try to put hope on paper in the coming weeks so that on December I can put it all in a one page letter to two hundred of my closest friends.

My home is buzzing with Thanksgiving plans.  Shay and Frank will be home this year and Christy and I will host Deb and Kathi, Dave and Megan.  A full table of eight is my ideal number for the meal because it will fill our table once again and I’ll get goosebumps when the youngest at the table gives thanks for another year of life as we know it.  Before Thanksgiving, though, I must go to Nevada for a week.  In winter I must carefully moniter wunderground.com for forecasts from here to the Moapa Valley.  While the Moapa Valley in November is pleasantly cool, there is no snow.  To get to the Moapa Valley, however, I must drive through some high mountain spots like Bluffdale, Nephi and Cedar City, which do have lots of snow.  Once at my cozy home in Nevada I’ll enjoy the “no snow” zone.

I spent October traveling to Boise then New Orleans.  I had a great time in both places and ate seafood every day at every meal for a week in New Orleans.  This month on the 12th we have a chili cook off for my support group and, of course, I’ll enter and am hopeful of winning. 

I’ve really wanted to blog more regularly, but not enough to actually blog regularly. Sometimes I do not think about this blog for weeks at a time, then I do and with pristine intentions, I think I will do it NOW, then the phone rings or the doorbell or Christy wants to do something and my intentions continue to pave a road to hell! But, this week I’m at my computer actually posting on my blogs. Yes, I have two. The other is listed on my “favorite blogs” on this page. Sometimes I’m tempted to just copy what I write on one to the other, but I always refrain from doing that because it doesn’t seem creative enough for my overly developed sense of self.

I’m off to Montana for most of July. Christy will drive with me as she has a week off work and we will be followed by our friends Deb and Kathy. I’ll buy a new car in Montana (no sales tax there) and assess the damage to my property caused by Spring flooding of the back acreage and dead trees caused by pine beetle blight, which has completely killed the pines in the Helena National Forest (our land backs up to it) and has now killed most of our pines. The saving grace for our property is an abundance of aspen. I’m having the trees uprooted because I don’t want hundreds of stumps. The cost of this seems astronomical.. The “tree pusher” tells me he charges $85.00 per hour where his heavy equipment is needed.. I’ll start with the 15 large pines that threaten the main house and see what more I can afford. We also have a plumber lined up and the well man, because the flooding has probably contaminated the two wells that serve the back 10 acres. C’est la vie!

I did not get to Montana at all last year so there is probably a lot to do. Erin’s husband (my step son-in-law whom I love,) Carl, will visit in Montana the weekend of the 22nd and he will do whatever we decide is most pressing. He will also fly fish the Missouri in a float he will row and we will have an exquisite meal at the Montana Club in Helena. I’ll also take the girls to dinner there next week.

I’m looking forward to all of this and more as I continue to enjoy life as I know it in my “golden years.”

Shay, who will be thirteen next month, attends the Arts Academy.  The Arts Academy is a small urban elementary school with great emphasis on the arts.  Shay, Christy and I love the Arts Academy and support it every way we can.  The school must raise $50,000.00 each year to supplement all other sources of funding.  We do that with a “gala” at one of the best venues in SLC, the Rose Wagner Theater.  There is a great auction and the prizes are as creative as the school’s curriculum.

This year I decided that we would offer them a New Orleans Creole meal for eight diners in our home.  I wasn’t sure they woud know what to do with that offer, but they did.  The Board was thrilled and Christy was happy they were.  One of the Board members asked if Christy’s Mom would be willing to have her photo in the auction catalog in an apron!  When Christy stopped laughing, so replied, “Betty in an apron?  No such photo exists, but we can provide some glamour shots.”  That’s my Christy!

So, now I’m researching menus for the most representative of New Orleans.  We’ll probably have the dinner later this summer, as I have places to go and things to do until then.

Life is good!

Ever since we were asked to leave Spaces I’ve been adrift trying to decide where I felt more comfortable – eblogger or wordpress - I could not make a definitive decision.  I have tried both and while they each have some fine features they also each present peculiar limitations.  For instance, I can’t find a way to use color here nor a way to change fonts and size.  At eblogger I can’t find an easy way to customize my blog.  All this may have to do with my limited knowledge, but my knowledge was just as limited at Spaces, but Spaces was much easier for me to navigate.  But, alas, Spaces is gone and I must work with what I have.

Since October I’ve not blogged regularly and by last week I missed it so much I blogged on wordpress.  Still no definitive decision.  Well today I decided that I’ll blog in both places, if and when I feel the urge.  Does it matter?  No, it does not.  I blog for me.  I blog because I love to write and because blogging has seen me through some tough times and has been very fulfilling.  Also, I have missed my blogging friends.  So, I’m back with a vengeance.  I’ll blog on eblogger and wordpress alternately.  I’ll blog as often as I can.

Last weekend I read through the blogs I wrote during the last nine months of Dean’s illness.  While I wrote each day during that period, I had no idea how important each outpouring was to my mental and emotional well-being.  As I read those entries and the encouragement of old friends and new friends, I realized how much it had meant to the quality of my life at that sad time.  Blogging got me through days and nights when I needed to talk to someone at a time when there was no one to listen, usually in the wee hours of the night and morning.  I am truly grateful that blogging was available to me. 

I still miss Dean, but I am building a new life firmly on the foundation of the old.  Dean is with me at all times and as I read those blogs from 2006 I knew that he is cheering me on just as he did when he was here.

I’m off to New Orleans for my family reunion next month and I have a retreat to give on sponsoring recovering women in May.  I must go to Nevada to check on things and renew my driver’s license before New Orleans and to Montana as soon as the snow melts which should be the end of May.

I’m a traveler and a reader and those two pursuits go together like gravy and rice (as we say in New Orleans.)  I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately (after Dean’s death I started speaking at recovdery conferences again) so, naturally, I’ve been reading a bit.  Add to the traveling the fact that I do not sleep well and we have the perfect storm to create the traveling insomniac reader!  These are the last three books I’ve read and that I highly recommend.

MOLLY IVINS: A Rebel Life by W. Michael Smith and Bill Minutaglio                                                                                                 Lord, I miss Molly Ivins - think of the fun she would have with the “trashbaggers,”  Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman and Sara Palin!  Smith was for years Molly’s faithful researcher and Bill Minutaglio knew her well and knew the political milieu in which she lived and worked.  She was the exquisitely educated daughter of a Texas oil executive and a major player in Houston society.  She was a tall redheaded beauty who drank and smoked too much and took great pleasure in the betrayal of her conservative daddy’s values with a “killer” wit.  Thankfully, the authors, who obviously loved Molly, do not “whitewash” anything.  Anyone who loved Molly will love this book and I did both.

CLEOPATRA: A Life by StacySchiff                                                                                                                                                                    Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian.  She takes the legend of this elusive queen and all that has been written about her and separates the myth from the reality.  She examines what was written about Cleopatra by Romans who hated her and others who romanticized her then shines the light on what we really know about the time in which Cleopatra lived and the mores and customs of that time.  Schiff is an admirer of the well-educated, brilliant ruler Cleopatra really was and paints a picture I loved.

DAY AFTER NIGHT: A Novel by AnitaDiamant                                                                                                                                              Anita Diamant knows women.  She proved that in THE RED TENT!  This is the story of four young women (ages 17-20) who after the holocaust flee separately to Palestine.  They meet in a British internment camp near Haifa where they have been imprisoned because they have no official identity papers.  There is Shayndel, a Polish resistance heroine; Zorah, a Polish concentration camp survivor; Tedi, a Dutch refugee who was hidden, but turned in to the Nazis by her “protectors” and Leoni, a French teenager who was separated from her family in Paris and forced  into a brutal life by an older woman.  This is an uplifting story about the resilience of the human race.  The story includes an exciting escape planned and executed by the young Israeli Palmachniks.             

Enjoy!                                                                                                                                                                      

I moved my blog from Spaces in October and learned enough to post once. I was, however, concerned more by the appearance of the post and it’s personality than I was by the message. Add to that the fact that I did not know where my friends from Spaces were and was fearful that no one could find me and no one would read me….such a ‘recovering princess’ am I! This past week I missed writing on my blog so much that I forgot about my ego concerns and started to make the effort to get back. What took me from Monday to Saturday to type the first word was that I could not remember my ID or password. This morning it occured to me that I have a file entitled CODES in which I note every new ID and password for every site I use. I found the needed info in that file and here I am. When I got here I found messages from three old friends and one new one.

So, I’m back and I’ve been to visit my old friends and I’m off to intoduce myself to the new one.

It will probably take some time to become proficient at getting around this new neighborhood, but I’m working at it.

I’m trying to move my blog from msn spaces to wordpress. This is not easy! I’m remembering the insecurity I felt when I started my blog on spaces and this is even more difficult. I will, however, get accustomed to the change and in a few months confidence will return and I’ll wonder why I was fearful. Because I know this, I’m willing to try.