Some Holiday Highlights before I decide to clean up the flat and get ready for New Years. I guess the season is passing by – as it does. Bring on 2013 and hopefully a whole lotta goodness.

Adventures to look forward to:

• Finishing the first draft of my story for the second time. Sending out the work and saying “hello” to agents.
• Travelling to Hungary for Easter.
• New projects and wonderful work adventures.
• Clear scans.
• The baby project.
• And enjoying every single day of feeling good, living in love, and just being HERE.

2012 Christmas Highlights:

• Mom and Dad making gingerbread cookies, just as I posted on this blog about missing Lulu’s cookies. Mom made a gluten & grain-free cookie, and dad cut them into all kinds of shapes and iced the people. He even made a gingerbread Zsolt.
• Mimosas. Mom and I snuck several of these drinks over the holidays with raspberries bobbing in the juice & champagne. I’m thinking I might sample some more come New Years. YUM. It totally satisfied my recent orange juice craving.
• Being together. I’ll never stop being thankful for being with my family on Christmas. Now if only we could be in two places at once and share with Zsolt’s family too. Well, hopefully next year.
• December 24^th. Zsolt and I have a little Christmas celebration to ourselves every year. Typically that preceded our parting ways to visit our families . . .but now we’re a family ourselves, so we stick together. I won’t go into details, but should at least say that the night involved dancing.
• Balaton from the 80s. We received a lovely book from a lovely lady all about Lake Balaton. This book must have been published in the 80s, and it’s all in English. Zsolt’s mind was BLOWN when we opened this gift. He read the entire thing cover to cover.
• Bing Crosby. We’ve been listening to good old Bing on the record player. I’ve already talked about the skipping and the nostalgia in the cracks and bumps . . . but it’s so lovely, I thought it’s worth mentioning again.
• Telestrations. A FUN game where you pass around a word as you would in the game ‘telephone’, except instead of whispering you draw the word. This game works best if you are bad at drawing. Otherwise it could become boring.
• SNOW. Ottawa is a giant snowball. It’s been snowing and snowing and snowing. Not on Christmas, but ever since. Now, where are the snow shoes and cross country skies? Oh wait . . . I’m right in the middle of the city without a car. Brutal! I’ll just stick to shovelling my stairs.

I hope your holidays were just as lovely. And you know what? They’re not over! Isn’t that fantastic?

Happy Christmas, and Happy New Year, may 2013 bring health, success, and so much Love into you life. WOOOHOO for another year! And for Christmas. I love Christmas. 🙂

Thank you to everyone who has been reading this Bumpy Blog with all its random posts, changes, and deviations. I don’t know where we’re heading, but it’s wonderful to have such good company for the journey. Thanks you for your comments, your visits, just being here and for accepting me as part of your online world.

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! And enjoy yourselves. God I love this time of year. And I love being healthy. And I love being with family. Don’t you?

Catherine

P.S. Yesterday I made an amazing cake for my annual family St.Hubert’s chicken dinner. We go to this restaurant called St. Hubert, and this year,  for the first time ever – everyone came back to our place afterward for dessert. I pulled out the very fine china, (so fine, it rarely sees the light of day) and served up this lovely maple syrup floating cake. It’s not difficult to make, it’s IS gluten free (but the kind you would never suspect to be gluten free), and I was so darn proud of it! Add some vanilla ice cream on the side, and I think I should have been crowned hostess with the mostess for the evening. We put on some Bing Crosby that Zsolt & I had bought from a thrift shop, and played it on Lulu’s old record player. That record player is sentimental magic. I think my dad partiucarly loved the cracks and pops as Bing sang White Christmas and the music got stuck on one particular line that was repeated over and over till Zsolt moved the needle.

I miss Lulu at this time of year. She was the best for Christmas and cookies and sucre a la creme. I miss old family gatherings where she’s be in the middle (she’d insist on being in the middle) watching over everything and speaking very loudly. There are things that I miss and things I can’t control. But this Christmas has been lovely despite all of that, and I am looking forward to our families growing – so maybe one day I can see my own mother as the matriarch where the grandkids gather round, and she makes them whatever little Christmas touch she decides to adopt. And then, even later, when my kids have kids, I’ll get to know that pleasure too. For sure I’m making them ginger bread cookies with icing. That’s what Lulu did for me, and I love it.

What a long P.S.

Ok, that’s all for now. Again, thank you so much for being here. 🙂 Catherine x

Okay, The middle of a hot flash may not be the ideal time to start this post, but I don’t care! Happy holidays everyone! Your celebration of choice is fast approaching and I dare say there’s a little cheer in the air.

Zsolt and I are big partakers of Christmas. We love our Christmas traditions. I’ve been holding off getting all festive for the past several weeks, just itching to pull out the miniature plastic tree we bought at Woolworths when the chain still existed, and the ornaments we’ve collected on our travels (latest edition: Santa waving from a NYC yellow cab), and the 50s Christmas records of hymns mixed with upbeat swanky party sounds, plus the Hungarian children’s choir singing tunes like Kis Karácsony, Nagy Karácsony

*Reflective sigh.

I won’t even go into what it means to me to be HERE, to celebrate NOW, to have my HEALTH, and to be so full of LOVE. I won’t go into it because you probably already know that it means everything to me. (Though I’ll likely go into it later, as the season progresses – I get so stupidly sentimental.)

Instead I’ll tell you why shopping online is pretty much just as challenging as shopping in the store.

Now look, I’m no advocate of Black Friday or Cyber Monday (Though even at the thought of those words, my mind lights up with sales for Soia & Kyo or Karen Miller – my current favourite designers of beautiful clothing for beautiful woman, meaning every woman.) but the plain fact is that Christmas is a time when along with celebrating rebirth, miracles, good will . . . we allow ourselves a little guilt-free indulgence. (Which very easily turns into guilt-full overspending if not careful, as you are about to see.)

Right: The man, otherwise known as Zsolt, wants a Nexus 4 for Christmas. Years ago I promised him a Sony hand-held play/toy thing if he graduated from his PhD. But then we were rather hit-up for an extended period of time, and that graduation present just kinda fell to the wayside. Now it’s a dated device. BUT the Nexus 4 is apparently not dated. I don’t why, maybe because it’s brand new? Who cares, he really wants it and has been working so hard I’d love to give it to him. Therefore, it has become my mission to get him this phone/toy/mini-computer thing for Christmas.

So, plan of attack:

Follow twitter feeds of people who tweet about Nexus 4.

Change homepage to Nexus 4 sales page.

Sign up for newsletter.

Wait.

Which is exactly what we did until today. TODAY I get a call from Zsolt.

“Catherine, it’s going on sale in Canada at 3.00pm today!” (By the by, how could I have missed that? I’mHOOKED UP for this kinda information.)

His phone call was 10 minutes before 3.00pm.

So, what can you do, right? Drop everything and start hitting F5 on the Nexus 4 page . . . which, according to a blog post I read, refreshes a page very quickly and easily.  So I’m all F5, F5, F5, F5 for like 10 minutes. And as I’m hitting this button, I’m thinking, GEEZ, so much for not engaging in commercial craziness. But, at least I can do it from the comfort of my home.

F5, F5, F5, F4! Wrong! F5, F5, F5, etc.

3.00pm arrives and still, I’m getting a sold out message from the Google people. But then my mobile phone rings. It’s Zsolt, he’s got the sucker in his shopping cart.

“Buy it!” I say. “Buy it right now before it expires!”

And we hang up.  So much for Christmas magic and Santa surprises. I’m barking orders to the giftee to BUY BUY BUY the gift. And as he does this, I don’t stop – cause you know what it’s like with online shopping, things happen.

F5, F5, F5, F5!

Ah! I finally have the option to load it into my shopping cart. (The shipping date at this point is 1-2 weeks.)

The mobile phone rings again.

“It won’t take my card!” he says.

Ah ha! Zsolt has been struck by the cursed requirement to start a credit rating from scratch upon arrival in a new country. Really, why can’t we carry credit ratings country to country? And the same thing goes for car insurance. But anyhow. . .

“Here!” I throw him my card details and hang up after leaving instructions for him to call me back with an update.

(FYI last time the Nexus 4 was available, it sold out almost immediately. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier – we were panicked because we knew that out there in cyberspace was a flood of competition, unseen but fierce.)

Then I return to my shopping cart and debated closing the screen. But his purchase hasn’t gone through yet . ..  and anyhow, it would take several more clicks to the actual purchase confirmation . .. so instead I try to go forward just another step with the order. But no! Google isn’t letting me because their website is being swamped with requests.

F5, F5, F5!

The phone rings again.

“There’s an error in the order! I don’t know why, but it won’t go through!” he tells me.

He taps out of the fight, and now I’m in the ring.

“I’m on it,” I tell him.

Again we hang up.

F5, F5, F5 – success! The shopping cart advances me to the next step. By now the shipping is 3-4 weeks, but that’s still fine. So in go the details, and out comes the order confirmation. Wooohooo! I got the man a phone/toy/thing for Christmas.

Feeling pretty satisfied. I call up Zsolt. “I got the phone!”

And he’s not quite as excited, for some reason.

“Hello? I got the phone?”

“I think I might have gotten it too.”

Yeah, he did after amending the purchase details – though he didn’t realize it initially. So, we both bought this crazy phone. And for some weird reason, neither of us trusts our order enough to cancel the purchase.  So either I’ll gift myself with a mobile device, or we’ll return it this evening. Either way, please take this as a warning: Shopping madness can set in anywhere, anytime. Tread carefully through the amazing sales, the free shipping, the yummy samples, the discount card with your next purchase that you feel the need to redeem right away.  (Enjoy the shopping, but beware – don’t lose your head, is all I’m saying. ‘Cause it’s easy to lose your head!)

But on the bright side of all the maddness – We got the phone! Wooohooo!

I hope you enjoyed this heart-warming story about the miracle that is Christmas shopping. Or at least, the miracle that is F5.