The Twelfth Day of May

Where in the world am I today?

Post scheduling is a wonderful thing. This is a scheduled post!  Therefore please go ahead and consider it wonderful.   If you haven’t heard of any horrendous plane crashes with Canadians aboard, today is my second day in Athens, Greece.

Did you know there are 60 places in the world called Athens?  Most of them are in the U.S., but you can also visit Athens in Brazil, Scotland, Portugal, Italy, Serbia, Cuba, Finland and Germany.  The world is a crazy place.  I’ve never been to Athens, Ontario, but I have been to Paris in my birthplace province.  It was a long time ago and I don’t remember it.  Sorry if you got excited there for a second.

Our flight was ten hours and three minutes on Sunday from Toronto to Athens.  I have no idea if I’m lying or not, because all this is actually in the future.  Imagine going so far away in just ten hours.  I imagine I said that to myself a lot on Sunday.  Or whatever day we’re currently experiencing.  Always wanted to time travel, and here I am.

Parthenon/Acropolis/Athens, Greece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_temple

 

List of Eleven

From 365 Days of Writing Prompts, January 3rd.

Kick It:  What is the 11th item on your bucket list?

I do not have a bucket list and probably never will have one.  I get exhausted just thinking about such things.  And W has become so efficient and organized doing the shopping that I don’t even have a grocery list kicking around anywhere from which I could take the eleventh item and use it to write something astounding.  Imagine an entire blog post on lettuce.

No, it’s okay, I can’t imagine that either.

Instead,  I’ve decided to focus on a couple of random words in this prompt and call it being creative.  Or maybe even inspired.  Although that’s probably pushing it.  So here’s a list of eleven memorable quotes from the book Eleven Minutes, by Paulo Coelho. 

“Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. “Once upon a time” is how all the best children’s stories begin, and “prostitute” is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let’s keep that beginning.”

“When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself.”

“I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It’s all a question of how I view my life.”

“When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.”

“I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I’m a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other.”

“No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it”

“Considering the way the world is, one happy day is almost a miracle.”

“Really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.”

“No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there’s no point wasting my time looking after things that aren’t mine.”

“Read. Forget everything you’ve been told about books and read.”

“She wasn’t a victim of fate, she was running her own risks, pushing beyond her own limits, experiencing things which, one day, in the silence of her heart, in the tedium of old age, she would remember almost with nostalgia – however absurd that might seem.”

There.  Now wasn’t that a lot more educational than finding out that I’ve always wanted to swim naked in Paris?  Well I certainly hope so.

Love A Rainy Night

Paris in the pouring rain (Photo credit: david.nikonvscanon)

The only thing better than a rainy night in Paris is a rainy night here followed by a rainy morning which turns into a rainy day.  And then a rainy weekend.  My little patch of the world is very green.  And extremely wet. Okay, maybe that’s not better than Paris.  But I can’t imagine their rain is any more fun than ours.

With two days off to stay in out of the rain, I am happy to report that Operation De-Clutter is going swimmingly!  Two big purple bins are full and tucked away in the basement.  I no longer feel like the walls are falling in on me. I can see the surfaces of things.

Still lots to do, but I may have to slow down in the next few days because the middle toe on my left foot is badly bruised.  You know how it is when you bang some part of your body on something and it really hurts, so you continue to bang into things with it several more times over the course of the day?  Just to make sure you can go through your entire repertoire of curse words?   That was my Sunday.  Hallelujah.  God gets you for doing housework in your bare feet.

I wanted to post some great rain music on Sunday, but I never got around to it, so it’s been bumped to Monday.  We’re not expecting to see much of the sun until Thursday this week, but I like the rain.  You can sing in it.  And laugh.  And walk hand in hand with the one you love and get drenched and catch pneumonia.  I put that last bit in to see if you were still paying attention.  It’s okay, I’m done, so you can go ahead and listen now, and let these rain songs make you feel good.

Half Blood Blues

I’m almost finished reading “Half Blood Blues” by Esi Edugyan.  Here’s what the goodreads website has to say about it:

Berlin, 1939. A young, brilliant trumpet-player, Hieronymus, is arrested in a Paris cafe. The star musician was never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black.
Fifty years later, Sidney Griffiths, the only witness that day, still refuses to speak of what he saw. When Chip Jones, his friend and fellow band member, comes to visit, recounting the discovery of a strange letter, Sid begins a slow journey towards redemption.
From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world, and into the heart of his own guilty conscience.
Half-Blood Blues is an electric, heart-breaking story about music, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

It’s no fast paced thrilling page turner, so it definitely fits the bill if you’re looking for a book to relax with while you’re actually learning something about a whole different era.