Letter From New York 12 17 14 Up to ourselves…

December 17, 2014

It is dark and drear here in the Hudson Valley. The temperature is relatively mild but seems much colder due to the damp. Across the creek, wisps of fog play through the barren tree branches. Almost all the snow has been wiped away by the steady days of rain.

After my morning coffee, I built a fire and put on jazzy Christmas music and sat down and wrote out my Christmas cards, taking them to the post office and sending them off on their way. It feels like a night to curl up with a good book but I won’t be doing that until later; I am off to the Red Dot tonight with friends for a mid-week get together.

While grey and drear in the Hudson Valley, it is peaceful in Claverack. I feel far from the madding crowd and am grateful that I am. I have one more trip into the city tomorrow for a Holiday party and then I’m here until the New Year begins. I’m looking forward to that.

It will be another extended respite from the world.

And that will be appreciated. It’s not all quiet out there in the world.

The Sony hacking situation seems to get worse, with violence threatened against theaters that show THE INTERVIEW. Most large theater chains are “suspending” their showings of the comedy. Warnings were given to stay away from theaters because there might be 9/11 style attacks.

JUST in from CNN is the news that Sony is canceling the December 25th release of the film due to the threats.

Current and former employees are suing the studio over the damage while they are scrambling to protect accounts by changing passwords as fast as their little fingers can type.

Other studios seemingly aren’t pleased with Sony and aren’t rushing to its defense. Is it every man for himself?

Helen had the face that launched a thousand ships. Sony has the picture that seems to be sinking a studio.

There are other exciting things happening that I will delighted to explore from the comfort of Claverack Cottage. The Rover has detected methane on Mars, one of the building blocks of life. What will Rover find next? I’m hoping that it is a Christmas discovery.

And I will bow my head today and say prayers for the children who were murdered in Pakistan. The country has declared three days of mourning post massacre and has called meetings of all political sides to deal with the Taliban threat. In the last decade, the Taliban, driven on by their absolute belief that they alone are right, have killed 50,000 Pakistanis.

Absolutism is hard to contradict and elusive to defeat.

Before leaving for the Red Dot, I will turn on my Christmas lights. North America burns brighter in December and January with all the Christmas decorations and the difference can be seen from space.

We are perhaps combating the psychological darkness with Holiday lights, defying the literal and figurative night with joyful decorations. I would like to think so; it has been a hard year for many and I know lots of people who would like to see 2014 disappear in the wake of their lives.

It’s not easy though. The end of the year is a marker but doesn’t magically change anything.

That we have to do ourselves.

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Letter From New York 12 16 14 Life goes on…

December 16, 2014

My life has a certain rhythm these days. I wake. I have coffee. I read the NY Times headlines on my phone. Today, I woke up in the city and did the same.

Last night was a pleasant evening, dinner with my friend Robert at one of our favorite haunts, Thai Market at 107 and Amsterdam. We exchanged Christmas presents. And talked about what was happening in the world.

All day Robert had been wrestling with new computer systems at his office and had not really kept up with what was happening in the world. He knew there was a hostage situation in Sydney but did not know the details and wanted to so I filled him in on what I knew from following events during the day.

We laughed and joked with Cathy, the bartender, who usually only works on Saturday nights now that she is a full time teacher. She is off to Christmas in the Turks and Caicos.

Life goes on, despite any terrible events around us, near at home or far away, we keep on living our lives. As were the people in the Lindt Café in Sydney, just living their lives when Man Haron Morsi came in with a shotgun and held them hostage.

As Robert said last night, you don’t know when something will happen. Life is fragile and tenuous and we are surrounded by a myriad of things that could go fatally wrong on any given day. But we go on living our lives.

While tragedies happened, the State Legislature in New York, made yogurt the “Official State Snack.” I missed that until this morning; it was one of the items in the daily New York briefing that is digitally delivered by the Times. Apparently, it made the State the butt of jokes by David Letterman and others.

Apparently there was a ban on ferrets in New York City. Mayor DeBlasio has taken care of that one.

We have now a law prohibiting people from having their picture taken with big cats. What defines a big cat I wonder?

And I’m delighted to know that sparklers have been legalized in New York State though not in New York City.

While world events were taking place, important laws were being passed here in New York State, including a prohibition on piercing or tattooing your pet. Didn’t even occur to me that anyone would do it but apparently there are those who did. They are now banned.

And while I am sipping my morning coffee in Manhattan, the Taliban has killed over a hundred people, mostly young children, in a raid on a school in Pakistan. The ruble continues to fall, the market is making a bit of a recovery from its swoon over tumbling oil prices, traffic continues to roll through the streets of Manhattan and we’ll have rain this afternoon with temperatures scrapping 50 degrees.

Life moves on.

Rather than hide out in the apartment, I am going to tempt the fates and mosey over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an afternoon in their galleries. Then I will have dinner with my old friend, Mona Tropeano, before rumbling back north to the little cottage on the creek to finish my Christmas cards.

Life goes on.

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Letter From New York 12 15 14 Terrorists or madmen…

December 15, 2014

Last night, my friends Lionel and Pierre came over for dinner – asparagus soup, mashed sweet potatoes, baked squash and a sirloin fresh from the farmer’s market. We were just into the soup course when his phone made a noise; a news alert was coming in.

The alert was that hostages had been taken in Sydney, a drama that would be played out into the morning today. Lionel is from Sydney originally and he excused himself to phone his family to make sure none were involved. All were accounted for and far from the scene.

I arrived in New York this morning and went into the Acela Club at Penn Station as I had a bit of time before I was to meet my friend Mary Dickey for lunch. My arrival at the Acela Club coincided with the moment that the Sydney police stormed the café and I watched events unfold, live and in real time.

It seemed a bit surreal, to be seated in the Acela Club, sipping a coffee, while half a world away this drama was being acted out, in a city I once knew fairly well and which I loved.

Little was known at the time and much is yet to be revealed, even though the crisis is over. There are two dead plus the gunman, an individual who identified himself as a Muslim cleric. He had some of the hostages hold up what appeared to be a black and white Islamic flag in the windows of the Lindt Chocolate Café, an unlikely seeming place for a hostage crisis.

Turns out he was quite the fellow, this Man Haron Monis. He had served community service time for pleading guilty to sending threatening letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers, calling the deceased “child killers.” He called himself a spiritual healer and had allegedly sexually abused some of those he was supposed to be healing and it seems that he was being linked to the murder of an ex-wife. He apparently had no religious training.

A website by Monis or his supporters claim that all the allegations were trumped up.

Some believe he was committing suicide by police, a thing not unheard of. He certainly seemed to have gotten the attention he wanted. From what I can gather, it’s believed in Sydney that he wasn’t really a terrorist but a deranged man.

Whatever the truth, two innocent people are dead.

In a gesture that was affecting, citizens of Sydney began a twitter campaign to combat a potential Muslim backlash. #illridewithyou was the campaign’s hashtag, offering to ride with Muslims needing to get around Sydney on public transportation. It has since gone viral. It seems very Australian.

My eyes watered up when I read the story.

Australia is an “open and generous” country said Prime Minister Tony Abbott and that is how it has struck me and it has struck me as a place removed from the violence of our terror stained world. But it is not. No place is safe from terrorists or madmen, whatever Man Haron Monis turns out to be.

In Pennsylvania, as I write this, a manhunt is ongoing for an individual who apparently killed six members of his family in a domestic dispute. That was happening as I was sitting in the café above the Fairview Market on Broadway, having a delightful lunch, chatting with Mary about the fallout from the Sony hacking scandal.

It is on days like this that I treasure the peace of the countryside and am grateful for the respite it provides from the terrors of the world in which we live, counterbalanced by the incredible human generosity of those who took the #Illridewithyou viral.

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Letter From New York 12 14 14 A grey and gloomy day on the road to Christmas

December 14, 2014

The light is beginning to fade here in the Hudson Valley; it has been a painfully grey day. Not once has been there a burst of sunlight to shatter the exterior bleakness. Christmas carols are playing and they sound dirge-like against this shadowy day. It has been a day to cuddle inside and to read, reflect and do interior things.

I am having friends for dinner so started the day making fresh asparagus soup and prepping things for dinner. When I finish writing this, I will move on to the kitchen and start the meal.

Today, I also started doing Christmas cards, a few, adding personal notes to folks I have not seen for a long time and for who Christmas is seemingly our sole touch point.

A Climate Treaty has been signed in Lima though it seems that while all agree few are enthused. Scientists, I read, feel it falls far short of the actions needed to curtail climate change while some nations feel it costs them too much.

Cheney, to no one’s great surprise, is highly critical of the Senate “Torture” Report. Jeb Bush is giving some indications he is considering a 2016 run for the Presidency. Certainly Rick Perry is prepping for the race. He’s getting some coaching and has declared that the run for the Presidency is NOT an IQ test.

The good news/bad news story of oil continues. It slipped beneath $60.00 a barrel, which caused prices up here to drop to under $3.00 a gallon but which also shaved 350 points off the Dow on Friday, making for a scary Wall Street ride.

Some folks are saying it could go down to $40.00 a barrel, which would be very bad for the shale oil industry in North Dakota. It only makes money at about $60.00 a barrel. There are those who speculate that the Saudis are letting the price of a barrel of oil fall so as to get rid of the pesky shale oil producers here in America. After years of declining crude production in the US, the shale oil boom has made us something like the third largest oil producer in the world.

It’s certainly causing some hurt for Mr. Putin; Russia depends on its oil sales. The ruble has been crashing. Must seem like a grey day to him as well. Put Venezuela in that camp as well, hurting badly with the fall in prices. Same with Nigeria. Same with a few other countries, too.

Regardless of what is happening in the oil realm, all over the world we are moving toward Christmas.

It seems some Americans are eschewing an expensive Christmas and moving back toward simpler times with less extravagant celebrations of the Holiday. It will be interesting to see how this holiday shopping season works out in the end. Up? Down? We’ll know the figures right after Christmas.

On this grey day, Newtown is marking the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings with a private ceremony and quiet reflection. It is a town where the wounds have yet to heal and may never heal.

In another gruesome story, hundreds attended the funeral of Jessica Chambers, a Mississippi teenager who was doused with an accelerant and burned alive on the side of a road.

The mind boggles at the act while the heart revolts at the cruelty.

A reward fund has risen to $11,000 for information leading to her killer.

It is stories like that which darken my day and make me feel as grey and gloomy as the weather.

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Letter From New York 12/13/14 Not for another 89 years…

December 13, 2014

It is 12/13/14 if you do dates the American way. That won’t happen again until 01/02/03 in the next century, 89 years from now. I can’t even imagine what the world will be like 89 years from now. Certainly I won’t be here to see it but children born today will probably be around. Life expectancy is on the rise in most countries and in the 22nd Century, 90 may be the new sixty. Who knows?

I went to a screening of the first episode of Downton Abbey last week in New York. It was set in 1924. The Earl and Countess of Grantham are celebrating their 34th wedding anniversary. One of the characters remarked that if she got married right then, she would be celebrating her 34th wedding anniversary in 1958.

It was a jarring thought because the world of 1958 was radically different from the world of 1924. In between there had been the Great Depression and World War II, forever changing the world. The atom bomb had been dropped; half of Europe was shut up behind the Iron Curtain. Germany had been pared down and cut apart into East and West. The Soviets had pierced space with Sputnik. We were off on the race to the moon.

What a difference a few decades can make.

Lunching today at the Red Dot in Hudson, I was asked by someone if I knew where the Mimosa had come from? So I did what we all do today when faced with a question for which we don’t have an immediate answer – I googled it. The Mimosa apparently was the invention of the bartender Frank Meier at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1925. Thank you, Google. Thank you, Wikipedia.

As I was finishing my omelet, I decided that I would serve asparagus soup tomorrow for dinner. Not knowing what was needed, I googled asparagus soup, found a recipe that I liked and then made a list of ingredients on the notes section of my iPhone and went off to the Price Chopper for the ingredients.

Amazing. Having been the first boy on my block to have a car phone and one of the first to have a cell phone and one of the first to upgrade to a smart phone, I am dazzled by how far we have come since that big black box was installed in the trunk of my car.

I don’t take it completely for granted but I am sure anyone under twenty can’t imagine a world before these devices. If they really thought about it, I am sure I would seem quaint, an antique from another world. Could someone actually have lived at a time when you couldn’t put the world in your pocket?

There’s far more computing power in my little iPhone than there was on the first space shuttle. It’s boggling for me to think about.

And that’s only in thirty years, it having been early 1984 when I got both my first Mac and my car phone. It’ll be interesting to see what the next thirty years will bring, not to mention the next 89 when, if we’re still using the American style of dating, it will be 01/02/03.

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Letter From New York 12 12 14 Not all storms come from nature…

December 12, 2014

In the background I am listening to Christmas Carols playing softly on Pandora. I have three Christmas stations bookmarked there and I rotate between them and before the Holidays are over, will probably add one or two more to keep me company as we count down to Christmas.

The tree is up, the crèche is set and almost all the Christmas presents are taken care of…

This afternoon I will go out and purchase the last couple of things I intend to give and probably will go on to do Christmas cards tomorrow and wrap the few presents that remain to be done.

I am in pretty good shape this year.

Outside it is a winter wonderland. White, crisp and clean. A family of deer just ran by my window. All is tranquil.

It isn’t tranquil in Los Angeles. They had heavy rains there last night and northern California was pummeled. 200,000 people are without power and there are fears of mudslides due to all the land that was burned clear during the summer fires sliding away.

On the front page of the L.A. Times, there are stories about the storm but there are also headlines about the hacked emails of Amy Pascal of Sony Entertainment and Scott Rudin, the producer. There is open speculation that she may not be able to keep her job post the “racially insensitive” emails about President Obama the flowed between her and Rudin.

Both have come out and apologized but apologies may not be enough. Shonda Rimes, she of the golden fingers who created Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy and owns Thursday nights on ABC, tweeted something almost unquotable about the situation. It was something like: you can put a cherry on a pile of s*it but it don’t make it a sundae.

Wow.

Lots of unpleasant things were said about talent, including Angelina Jolie. And Kevin Hart. And Mark Ruffalo. And and and…

Apparently a lot of executives are spending time on the phone with agents and managers apologizing while also letting them know there might be more to come.

Ouch.

I think the group claiming responsibility for this hacking mess is something called Guardians of the Peace. They object to a comedy coming out on Christmas Day called The Interview, which is about an attempt to assassinate the leader of North Korea. Just how assassination attempts become a comedy I’m not sure but it stars James Franco and Seth Rogen so I am sure there is some bumbling involved.

North Korea denies responsibility for the hack while at the same time praising whoever did it. Good on you, they say.

So it is storming in California and not all the storms are of the natural kind.

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Letter From New York 12 11 2014 Feeling a bit like a country gentleman…

December 11, 2014

It is a winter wonderland outside the cottage today; three or four inches of snow fell overnight and once again transformed the landscape into a perfect winter scene. I am finding delight in the beauty.

Feeling quite like the country gentleman this morning, I lingered over coffee and the NY Times. The steady din of noise since the release of the Senate Report on torture has diminished a bit.

Obama is in an uncomfortable position; some Democrats are accusing him of a cover-up of a program he ended. Abroad, some international bodies and certain countries are howling for prosecution. At home, we seem to be saying let bygones be bygones with a Get Out Of Jail card being handed to those involved.

Jihadists are swearing revenge for our “torture” which seems to me to be a case of the kettle calling the pot black.

Down in Washington there is brinksmanship over passing a $1.1 trillion budget. Democrats are howling because of some late night insertions of rules that would relieve Wall Street of some regulation. Petitions are being circulated. Denouncements are being made.

A deal will probably happen.

Out in California, the north part of the state is preparing for potential flooding from heavy storms that are potentially going to break the worst drought in the state’s history. I think I read that this drought was the worst in 1200 years!

Falling oil prices are a blessing and a curse. There was an almost three hundred point dive on Wall Street yesterday as a result. The common motorist is a bit relieved to find gas for under $3.00 a gallon in most places – but not here in my little town. Still up around $3.25 in Claverack.

It is also, despite the constant rattle of depressing news, the Holiday season and I spent a frustrating half hour on the 800flowers.com website attempting [and finally succeeding] in ordering a gourmet basket. Either the site was slow or my connection was lousy but it was a painful enterprise. But still, it was one of the last things to do on my Christmas list.

We’re down to fourteen days until Christmas and I feel remarkably ready; usually at this time of year I’m feeling a bit of panic! I guess that is the upside of being a country gentleman for a period.

Sometimes I love this inactivity and other times I chafe and feel jealous of my friends who are off doing things with great purpose. I am lounging my way toward Christmas and now am about to leave to have a Holiday lunch with a friend.

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Letter From New York Dec 10, 2014 Beacon on the hill?

December 10, 2014

Writing this, I am headed back north after having spent the evening in the city, going to the Downton Abbey event and then having a late night dinner with my friend Robert. While I was riding down into the city yesterday, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California was unveiling the Senate Report on the CIA’s use of torture in the years following 9/11. By the time I arrived at the Acela Club at Penn Station to wait until it was time to go to the event, the airwaves were alight with the reactions to the Executive Summary of the Report, which runs in itself 525 pages. The actual Report, which remains top secret, is over 6,000 pages. Even Tolstoy would be amazed.

There are varied reactions to the Report, mostly down party lines. Republican Senator John McCain came out with a thoughtful, I thought, statement on the facts as outlined by the Senate Committee. As I read his statement, he said he understands the reasons that caused the use of these methods and that the folks both approving and performing the acts outlined in the Report thought they were doing what was necessary, he disputes the methods and that “we are always Americans, and different, and stronger, and better than those who would destroy us.”

The “acts” outlined in the Report were harsh and brutal and, according to the Report, both unnecessary and not fruitful. They included waterboarding; sleep deprivation, and something called “rectal rehydration,” which sounds pretty disgusting.

While waiting for the Downton event, I went online from my phone and absorbed what I could about the news breaking around the Report. As I was going to sleep, I thought about it and when I woke this morning and was having my morning coffee, I felt sobered.

It is one thing to suspect something has happened and it is another to be forced to confront the reality of it. As far as I can tell, no one is denying that things happened. What is being debated is the efficacy of the acts. The Senate Committee Report says they weren’t effective and the CIA is saying, yes, they were.

It is a debate that is raging and one that we should have. There are those who think the Report should never have been made public and there are those who are hailing its release as a sign that though we make mistakes [and even the CIA says “mistakes” were made], we can, as a country, admit those mistakes and work to ensure they never happen again.

It is sobering to me perhaps because I was born in that time after WWII when we presented to the world and to ourselves, a vision of ourselves, of this country, as the beacon of liberty and that we did things differently than other countries.

As an adult, now, I am not sure that was true. I have, after all, lived through Viet Nam, Bhopal, Afghanistan, Iraq and other sundry events that have left me wondering about the role of the United States in international events. But I always believed – and, in fact – still do, that we, for all our many mistakes, do our best to do the right thing.

But it is still sobering, this Senate Committee Report. If true, it means we have made some serious mistakes. Good that we are admitting them and working to see them righted.

I agree with Senator McCain’s assessment. I can understand how these decisions were made but am disturbed that they were. It is my hope – and prayer – that we do our best to prevent more “mistakes” and that we continue striving to be the beacon on the hill of freedom.

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Letter From New York December 9, 2014 Not unlike the folks at Downton Abbey

December 9, 2014

I am on the train, plowing south, toward the city. Outside there is an ice storm, making streets treacherous. Deciding caution was the better part of valor, I called a taxi to take me to the station. The Prius isn’t great when the roads are icy. Once I slid through the intersection at the end of the road, straight to the other side. I was lucky.

A kind man picked me up. Turns out he had been coached in football by my late neighbor, Hank Fonda. We talked about him for a while; the goodness I knew in him was underscored by what my driver told me: Hank had kept him out of a lot of trouble when he was young.

Tonight, there is an event in celebration of Downton Abbey at the Hudson Theater in New York; if it weren’t for the fact I had snagged a ticket, I wouldn’t be going into the city but would be cozying up to the Franklin Stove, listening to Christmas Carols and doing Christmas cards.

That’s a lot of what’s on my agenda for the next few days. I am mostly prepped for Christmas with only a few things left to order, mostly food baskets for those far and away.

It feels like a particularly well-organized Christmas this year, perhaps because I have more time on my hands than usual. I woke this morning feeling quite the country gentleman. Not sure why. Perhaps it was because the day could start lazily with good strong coffee and a perusal of the Times.

Once the things that needed doing were done, I showered, shaved and prepped for going down to town. To my great surprise, all the trains have been running on time. Often ice is worse than snow for them.

This brand of weather is likely to continue for the next few days with a break finally coming at the weekend. I’ll be doing a lot of homebound things I suspect tomorrow when I get back to Claverack, all the way through to the weekend. It’s not very safe on the roads and I think I’ll be living on what’s in the cupboards as opposed to making trips to the Price Chopper, which is about to get a new name, more upscale, better to position themselves against the behemoth down the road, Walmart.

Tonight at the Downton Abbey event will be Hugh Bonneville [Lord Grantham], the actresses who play Lady Edith and Mrs. Patmore as well as Robert Collier-Young, who plays the scheming Thomas. There will be highlights from Season Five, which is to premiere next month.

It is amazing the cult like following that has surrounded the show. I know folks who have Downton Abbey parties, expecting guests to show up as one of the characters. Each premiere episode results in many a bottle of champagne being uncorked. We seem to be fascinated by the doings of the very, very upper crust Crawleys and the adventures of the dozens of minions who care for them downstairs.

Julian Fellowes, the writer of Downton Abbey, every episode, is to be commended on the richness of his writing and his careful depiction of class differentiators in that time.

When Downton Abbey began it was 1912, the new season brings us up to 1924. It will be interesting to see how the Crawleys and their staff deal with the 1920’s and the social changes that are beginning to shift the landscape beneath them.

Perhaps that’s why the program resonates, we, too, feel the landscape changing under our feet. If you are not a digital native, the world in which we live seems confusing, with old ways rapidly evolving into the new and unfamiliar.

Perhaps nowhere has this been more evident than in the world of media, a world in which I have been a denizen for many a year. Just this morning I read a report in which network television viewing has declined 11% year over year and even more among Millennials. It is a shattering decline for the status quo.

At the same time, SVOD viewing is rising [Subscription Video On Demand (think Netflix and Hulu)] rapidly.

Television content providers, ad agencies, cable distribution companies, networks, everyone is scrambling to adjust and to survive in a future they can barely see.

Not unlike the Crawleys.

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Letter From New York December 8, 2014 The reality of change

December 8, 2014

It is 5:00 PM and it is dark here in Claverack. I have turned on the spotlights that let me see the creek from the dining and living rooms. All day today I have sat at the dining room table, doing my work for the day, watching squirrels romp on the deck while the creek went swiftly by, running fast.

I did a round of outside errands today, going to the Post Office to collect my mail. There is no postal delivery on my street so we all have Post Office Boxes up at the Claverack Post Office, a small outpost of the USPS we all hope will stay open. Any time there are talks of more budget cuts for the Postal Service we fear we will lose ours. It would be a little like seeing the heart cut out of the town; most days collecting the mail you run into someone you know, have a chance to visit with them and then go your way. They even collect your parcels for you and hold them if you want.

The team that runs the office has been here since I have been here; they know me and greet me warmly when I collect the overflow from my box. It is one of the wonders of life in the town of Claverack.

We worry. The town is changing a bit. There are rumors that a plot of empty land will be sold for a development of new houses. The Claverack Market, adjacent to the Post Office, shuttered its doors for good a month ago – they just couldn’t compete with the Hannaford that opened down the road from them.

Change is inevitable. The changing though is not always easy in its happening. We get disconcerted when the anchors in our lives slip away from us in the slipstream of time.

A friend of mine is sitting with her mother as her life closes; it will be difficult as they are very close and I am sure my friend will discover a well of loneliness when her mother passes.

Any unwelcome change can open the door to that well of loneliness. The passing of a parent, a friend, a partner, the loss of a job, moving when you might not really want to move, all these things cause loneliness to rear its head and remind of us of our humanity.

In this time of transition for me, I have faced not so much loneliness but aloneness, the sense of being one person facing out to the universe, working to build a new chapter in my life. But there are moments when that aloneness, not a terrible thing, does become loneliness and I yearn for some other point in life.

It passes. But in its presence, it reminds me of my humanity, my singularity, my existential presence.

Overall, this has been a wonderful fall, a fall that lingered with us longer than it could, blessing us with good weather. Shortly, it will officially be winter.

As I write this, it is chill but not so chill I couldn’t enjoy a walk earlier in the afternoon. Tomorrow it is supposed to be blustery, with freezing rain. Sounds not too pleasant but by the weekend, milder weather will have won out.

Celtic Christmas Carols play on Pandora; I will light a fire when finished with this and begin to prep for dinner with friends joining me at the cottage. I spent the day sending electronic Christmas cards.

All things considered, I have many reasons to be grateful so as I finished my walk this afternoon and came up my drive, I spoke to the universe and articulated my gratitude.

Change is flowing through my life and I am hopeful I will have the courage to shape that change.

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