This morning, I continued my tradition of keeping one gift back until the end of Christmas Day -- this time, seriously till the end, as the recipient stayed downstairs to watch the tube, while I sacked out. She found it under her pillow when she came, but chose to wait till this morning to open it, which I thought was nice of her. I started doing this because I want to stretch out the image of Christmas, to get away, as much as I could, from the feeling that Christmas was a masive disgorgement of presents, and then its Okay, I've Opened Them, Got Some Good Stuff, Didn't Get Some Stuff, What's On Television? It seems to work. I have heard of (not personally known) families that do it in waves -- so many at 8AM, so many at 10AM -- and that would work, too.
After wandering around a bit in a post-sleep daze (I slept well last night, unlike the last couple of nights), I pulled on an overcoat and went over to the supermarket, which I found to my dismay that they didn't have the Washington Post, my paper of choice for Sunday reading. NY Times, yes, Post no. Bummer. I'm willing to believe that it is somehow connected to the cold (its not frigid, but it is chilly - about 17 degrees F) so that they couldn't get the trucks out, or the shipments to the train, or whatever.
That started me thinking a little bit about retirement. We were talking about it last night -- we're pretty much agreed on what kind of house, but not where; I'm still up for Australia, and my partner is thinking 'maybe a bit further north in Pennsylvania' -- but now I have an added item for the ten or so that I wrote on a sheet of scrap paper -- has to be somewhere that, if remote deliveries of the Sunday paper I like are delayed, I can still get it.
And it doesn't have to be the Post -- that's just the best of what's available here. Years ago I subscribed to a service that would send you one Sunday paper from a range of cities, once a month. It would arrive on Wednesday or so, and while there were some duds, some were quite good. I'd do that again, if I could find it.
Happy Post , no pun intended, Christmas!
3 comments:
Retirement...looking into that myself.
Might I suggest Malta or Southern Italy
My wife's Italian, half of which comes from Sicily, so I think it'd be great fun to do that. Not sure, though. I'm somewhat of a timid traveler. But its worth thinking about... thanks for the idea, and the comment.
Sicily....very nice. Very pretty. Nice food, good people. I personally like Malta....originally thought it would be Italian Food, and English Speaking. Turned out to be Arabic speaking and English food. Bit depressing, that. Sicily was stunning.
I wrote about my Malta journey last spring on my web site....http://www.southtower.on.ca/Library/Malta2004/Malta2004.html
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