Home Cold Home

Home is where the laundry is...Zoey Sakura back home amongst the familiar.

Dec 23rd may very well be a blur to a lot of people, ours started at 4am in Florida and ended somewhere around midnight, on the edge of Christmas Eve. It involved a 5am argument with a bus driver, an infant with a lingering fever, a crowded airport, separate seats on a packed airplane and a baby that was her usual flying champion. Zo played with her neighbors for approximately half an hour before she settled into Mom's lap and slept until the landing gear came out. We bailed on the airport after donating several hundred dollars to park (absent minded mistake in planning) and shot home. In hindsight, it was a stellar day.

Now I'm listening to CBC radio and dozens upon dozens of fellow Canadians Christmas horror stories. The most recent story being a caller from Sudbury who needs to drive to Toronto in order to fly out and visit friends in Nashville, Tennessee which leaves me feeling absolutely rich in my proximity to a major US metropolitan area and it's access to easy travel. It also reminds me what a poor Canadian I am since I've never even heard of half of the places these callers make reference too. June and I always talked about seeing Canada later in our lives but should probably get a little more active in doing so. I think 2010 might demand a little more attention to our own beautiful and by the sounds of things, occasionally difficult to navigate country.

I might start by mining some great Canadian musical recommendations from my fully smitten Canadian music scenester, Johnny Teeter. I think I'll also drag my arse to Montreal, and perhaps even make it Algonquin Park for the first time in my life. We'll chuck in the Mariposa Festival again this year, an iconic Canadian event and the fiftieth anniversary of that special gathering (Ian Tyson and Gordon Lightfoot could probably make our entire year fully Canadian all by themselves), and at some point I'm going to build my own canoe, bottle my own maple syrup, and maybe become a mountie or make out with an eskimo...sorry, Inuit. Or I may just jump on the first flight to Orange County and make plans to see Canada some other day while I bask in El Camino Real sunshine with the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop. Canada's not going anywhere.

Merry Christmas friends and family. I wish you the very, very best of days and the happiest of hours as we slip into this, our first Christmas as a family. We'll think of you as we hope you might of us, and we'll see how naughty or nice we've all been come morning. It's good to be home no worse for the wear.