France calling

I have been dreaming again of France. It remains a magical event in my memory.

Google Maps has a balm for this painfully sweet longing: the Street View feature. I can go and revisit our little hotel, the Pantheon I visited on a crisp solo morning, and other locations.

I am consistently susprised at the power of the experience and nostalgia, now a few years later. The architecture, the food, the different-ness of everything. Just intoxicating.

I had secretly hoped to work some things out this year, and make another trip possible. We're absolutely not in such a position, and while I'm completely unsurprised, I'm secretly bitterly disappointed.

But this post is not intended to be about bitterness; it's about what joy I had in visiting, experiencing and remembering another place and culture. To be in another land, surrounded and immersed by another language and another history.

Tradition

Monday, I had sincerely planned to increase my exercise, both in frequency and intensity. I went to bed feeling a mite peaked, and woke up with a cold. I've tried before to soldier on through a cold, working outdoors and exercising, and I've learned through experience that it's a reliable and effective way to punch up the severity of an illness. So, last Monday I made a conscious effort to chill out and take lots of fluids.

That paid off, and my cold was relatively gentle and short-lived. Feeling about 95% yesterday, I made good on the promise I'd made myself last week, and continued my tradition of only the most intermittent exercise. Just often enough to cause significant discomfort, that's my motto. Therefore, I am in the kind of pain that makes me move about and groan like a mummy with a spinal cord injury. I couldn't tuck my head in properly when crouching into my car seat, and bashed my head on the edge of the roof.

I don't think I can take much more of this healthy lifestyle.

Off the grid

What a week. Good, bad and indifferent, all smeared messily across 6 days or so. In that time, I've/we've:

• Finished our meager Christmas shopping
• Partied with some truly great people
• Counseled a troubled, rowdy drinker to hew to a moral (me, can you believe it?) and considerate path (what is it about me that says: "amateur pastor?")
• Spent the next day riding out a doozey of a hangover
• Made a killer deal on some exercise equipment that might actually work for us
• Caught a cold

I've been too busy to spend much time in front of the computer, as much blessing as curse. How have you been?