Does anyone else ever feel that time is moving more quickly that it used to, and speeding by far too fast?

I do.

I remember as a kid, everything took FOREVER. It took FOREVER to drive to Hornby (in adult world, approximately 2.5 hours to the ferry, if you time it correctly and have the right music). Christmas Eve church service took FOREVER (actual time: 1 excrutiating hour). Waiting for the next birthday or Christmas was an eternity spent counting down the months.

I've always been very conscious of time in relation to age. For example, when I was 16, I used to think to myself that I could live my life all over again and still only be 32, and marvel at how young 32 still was. I did this every year until this year, when I realized that at 54, all of those life events that I still plan to go through - the marriage, the kids - won't be over, but will be "seasoned". My kids may even have their own kids...though hopefully not. I can barely get my head around the thought that I might one day be "Mom", let alone the thought of being "Nana". I flat out refuse to be "Grandma".

It seems to me that when you're waiting for something specific, time takes forever. Waiting for the end of the school year, for example, or waiting all week for Friday plans to pan out, or waiting for someone to come back. It's like watching a pot. But when you're just kind of living, and not waiting for any one thing in particular - no big events on the horizon, no special plans - time knows you're not watching it closely and those hands fly around the clock face far faster than normal.

I don't like it.

Tomorrow is Friday, but yesterday was Monday. I never thought I'd say this, but I wish the days were longer.

23 days ahead of schedule, I finished Lolita tonight at the driving range, while Kurt was practicing his swing. I have to say...it was a pretty great read.

We've been going over our anticipated expenses for 2008 and our travel costs this year will be...costly. However, they are also necessary when you're living in such a small place. You get itchy feet. I've heard that they're supposed to kick in every three months, and so the fact that I'm feeling them now means that I'm right on target, if not a bit ahead of schedule. One month today, we leave for Mexico and our feet leave this island for the first time. After that, we have a tentative trip planned to Toronto in May for a wedding, a trip home planned for July (though the logistics of who spends how much time and where are still being hotly debated...), and a possible trip to New York in September. That's a lot of useless air miles right there.

Obviously, we have to shuffle a few things around, financially. We have to budget for each of these trips and, even though travel out of here is actually pretty cheap, it all adds up and it all subtracts from our debt repayment/savings efforts. Still, at the end of the day, saving a bit more and having no break is not an option for us. We have paid vacation...why wouldn't we use it somewhere where we can also see much-missed friends and family? No brainer.

One area of our lifestyle that has taken a financial hit as a result of my new household "regime" (which also includes a low G.I. diet, by the way), is our date nights. Sadly, we have made the decision to cut them from once weekly to once monthly. We figure that one great date each month, at a fantastic place, is better than 4 OK dates each month at 4 pretty good places. Since it seems to be impossible for us to eat out together (lunch or dinner) for under $50 on the island, and most often the bill is closer to $70 or $80 (and that does not include a bottle of wine but may or may not include a couple of dark 'n stormies), our bank accounts will definitely benefit from this change.

Consequently, we are cooking again. For those of you who may remember the brief though fabulous life of the Floog, I am bringing it back. Maybe not THE Floog, unless I can instill any interest in Heather and Lai to join me in the revival, but definitely some recipe posting, since I've had some good experiences in the kitchen lately. Mostly vegetarian experiences, but good nonetheless. We moved here with what we considered to be the "best of" our kitchen, though we did forget the one thing we used most - our awesome, deep, stainless-steel skillet with a glass lid. Still, we arrived with our (extensive) spice collection, best utensils, our favorite pots, and the cookbooks I couldn't live without. Time to give this stuff a workout.

The 2008 Regime is coming together nicely.

I've been here for just over 2 months now. Sometimes it seems like I just got off the plane, and sometimes it seems like I've been here for ages. Maybe that's because the second coming of Christ is moving quicker than the average grocery line.

I digress.

After the newness wore off and I got more settled, I started to notice certain things missing...or, not where they're supposed to be. My good friend Shannen fits into this category.

I met Shan not long after I moved to Ottawa and we've been friends ever since. I've had the privilege of seeing her fall in love, get engaged and then married, and most recently become an absolutely amazing mom to Jaia.

For a lot of this time, we've also been MSN buddies. Day after day, week after week, we'd keep each other company during mundane work days, discussing topics infinitely more interesting than anything we were being paid to think about at the time. Every day, at some point, we'd catch up quickly online. Sometimes just a hello, most of the time substantially more than that. Even though I didn't actually see her as much as I would have liked to, I talked to her more than most of my other friends. Including my co-workers. Actually, she kind of was one, in that nine to five kind of way.

During the period we refer to as "the gray area", where Kurt and I were essentially homeless and not sure whether we were coming or going, Shan and I managed to squeeze in some pho at phive, followed by snacks and embarassing TV, with some Jaia time. We thought it would be a one-time thing, but as the Rock continued to make paper airplanes out of my work permit, we ended up with a whole bunch of extra nights to hang out. It was awesome. I was reminded (not that I needed to be) of what a great friend she is, and how much I wished we had started our weekly dates sooner. Pho at phive....peanut butter pie...whatever. Just more time.

Now, thousands of kilometres and a segment of ocean away, I miss her. My work computer is not MSN-equipped (it does, however, have Lotus Notes) and my internet connection at home is shoddy to say the least. At least I have her blog to keep me updated and give me my daily dose of Jaia, but it's still not the same.

I hope you have an amazing birthday, Shan. A virtual piece of scandalously good pie and a frosty drink (with an umbrella) is on its way to you, courtesy of moi. Wish I were there to share a real one with you.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! I hope it's as fun as this:

Ah...tricky.

Not because I'm predisposed to gorging myself on cake products and fries. In fact, I'm not a fan of cake, generally, and I will never order fries as my side dish unless suffering from a hangover of substantial proportions, in which case nothing but fries will do. Generally, I make healthy food choices. However, when my routine is off by a millisecond or I'm going through any sort of change whatsoever, I'm far too easily tempted to make the wrong ones.

The holidays are a time of excess...excess food, excess drink, excess usage of credit cards, excess family, etc. With the lack of family (andthe current lack of plastic...bye bye credit cards), we only managed to keep the excess food holiday rules alive. We did OK...but I'm anxious to clean out the kitchen and stock it back up with healthy munchables. Unfortunately, this is pretty difficult to do in a place where everything is imported and everything imported is expensive. All fresh fruits and vegetables, of course, fall into this category. So, it becomes a budgeting issue...cut back on something else to afford the fresh stuff. Having lived my entire life in a country where it was never an issue to find an eggplant, and an eggplant rarely cost morethan $3 or $4 dollars, this is tough to get my head around. I'm still aghast that people pay $1 for an apple. AN apple. Like...one.

Since the word 'diet' seems to cause Kurt to go spontaneously deaf, we're just "changing" things. Again. Wholegrain everything. Delicious brown rice. No red meat...actually, very little meat at all. More fish. No processed sugar, except for the occasional square of dark chocolate. Soy this, tofu that...if I can sneak it in without him noticing. Very limited dairy...none at all if I can establish a reliable source for soy yogurt. And somehow, I have to find a way to fill in the gaps with more fresh fruit and veggies...while still finding a way to pay our electricity bill. The needle on the scale has definitely crept downwards since our arrival here, at least there is some motivation to keep going.

AND...handy diet tip...watching an episode of 'Ramsay's KitchenNightmares' during dinner is a great way to curb your appetite. Seeing what he scrapes out of those disgusting kitchens (with his bare hands,no less) has caused me to put down my fork more than once.

So...remainder of the summer stress pounds...be gone. I'm so over you. And so are my pants.

I have always been a reader. When I was a kid, I was a certified bedtime abuser. In that, though I did have an actual bedtime when I was told to turn off my lights and go to sleep, I became a seasoned expert on determining the likelihood that my parents would check on me after that point and, if the coast was deemed clear, would find a way to read for hours past the point where I was supposed to be asleep. I guess I was also kind of a night owl. Looking back, and considering how much sleep I seem to require now to get through the day with any pretense of being alert, it's quite amazing how little sleep I functioned on as a kid.

Even from the early days of enjoying the grammatically incorrect Go Dog Go* (clearly translated directly from Japanese, and quite obviously not by someone who spoke English), I always loved books. The first "chapter book" I ever read, with Mom's help, was Charlotte's Web, followed closely by Little House in the Big Woods. After that, I was hooked. I found books at garage sales, the local library (though I was terrible at remembering to return them), under the Christmas tree or wrapped up for my birthday. I had a huge floor-to ceiling bookshelf in my bedroom, where I carefully sorted them not by author or subject, but by how much I liked them. If I was going to read it again, it went to the top shelf. The ones I would use as trading material with my sister (though I did have a winning sales pitch) went to the bottom. They moved houses with me, went on trips, got lost and then found, and took me on adventures I still think about, from time to time. I loved them...and still do.

Throughout my teenage years, the late-night reading was swapped for late-night phone calls and my books, so treasured in previous years, remained for the most part on the shelf. I bought the odd one here or there for a trip, and used them as excuses when I didn't feel like doing homework, but it became much less of a valued way to spend my time. When teenage drama gave way to the harsh reality of textbooks which cost more than the course I'd purchased them for, all of the allure of reading was lost to me. After spending hours studying, highlighting, reading, and then re-reading (because so much of my first degree made absolutely zero sense), the idea of picking up a book at the end of the day could not be more unappealing. Drinking was obviously a much better use of that time. Or sleeping, for that matter.

Now, two years out of university, I've started to miss my books. I've spend a lot of time collecting cookbooks, but real, actual, sit-down-and-read-me books had completely fallen off the radar until very recently. It's not that I haven't read anything at all over the past few years, but most of the reading I've done hasn't been fiction. I love fiction. So, in an effort to get back to being that sneaky book-loving kid of the past, I've made my second New Year's resolution for 2008 (the first being my budgeting/saving goals). I'm going to read at least one book each month for the entire year.

This doesn't sound hard. In fact, it sounds ridiculously easy, but I know that things come up and because I know I will quit my resolution at the smallest sign of failing, I made failing virtually impossible.

In order to kickstart my resolution, and to inspire me, I have stocked my bookshelf with a selection of books that I have always meant to read, but never got around to for whatever reason. I figure that at my age I should have read at least a few of the classics, so I'm starting with those. I finished my first book, Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility, tonight (which was obviously started in 2007, so I won't be cheating and counting it as my January book) and it felt great. It helped that it happened to be a great book. Next up is Lolita.

It feels good to be reading again. Instead of spending the hours between dinner and bed mindlessly surfing the internet, maybe I'm actually doing something good for my brain. I've even lured Kurt into the reading world by putting a copy of 1984 in his stocking. We'll see how it goes. Nerdy sidebar thingie will keep me accountable.

Happy New Year everyone...stay tuned for Resolution #3.

*Shockingly, Go Dog Go was featured on the "Most Recommended" shelf at a certain big box book store last year. I almost choked on my certain brand name caffeinated beverage when I saw it, but was secretly glad that generations of children continue to put their parents through the agony of "Do you like my hat? No, I do not like your hat. Good-by. Good-by." Yes, spelling error intentional. It is a classic. It has even been shortened into board-book format, for convenience, though the condensed version unfortunately skips all mention of hats.