Retrospectives – Carlanne.com

Romance and/or Travel: the journey or the destination?

Travel. The word can bring forth thoughts, memories, feelings. Yet, it is just a word. A six-letter word. Looking up definitions for such a word, I found many variations. As a verb, travel was defined as early as the 1300’s:

travel (v.)

c.1375, “to journey,” from travailen (1300) “to make a journey,” originally “to toil, labor” (see travail). The semantic development may have been via the notion of “go on a difficult journey,” but it may also reflect the difficulty of going anywhere in the Middle Ages. Replaced O.E. faran. Travels “accounts of journeys” is recorded from 1591. Traveled “experienced in travel” is from 1413. Traveling salesman is attested from 1885.

Sometimes the romantic travel of our lives seems just like this definition – travail. Finding a soul-mate seems even harder than finding comfort in economy/coach class airline seats.

TSA Checkpoint The good thing is that airline travel is a temporary thing, whereas the saga of finding a soul-mate seems to last a lifetime. Given the difficult journey of finding someone to enjoy spending time with, maybe one would be better off standing in the TSA line for the rest of their lives.

Privilege versus doing the right thing

I have been reflecting a lot on “doing the right thing” (higher moral ground?) versus what one might have the “privilege” of doing as an autocrat or totalitarian. Privilege, from the dictionary sense, as defined as a noun:

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Classical Music – Piano lessons carried forward

Some 60 (OMG!!!) odd years ago, my mother required me to take piano lessons. I believe, though I can’t swear to it, that my sister may also have been required to take the initial lessons but managed, at her more mature age, to wiggle out of them. She was, after all, some 8 years older than me. I hold her accountable for that today. <grin> I am still thinking of ways to get even <grinning louder>.

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Photography as a hobby – taking it to the next level

I have always loved taking pictures. I grew up with a mother who had to document all important occasions with her Brownie camera. I wanted more. I splurged and bought a Polaroid in my college days. Continue reading “Photography as a hobby – taking it to the next level”

Health and recovery efforts from stress

Homeowner/Board member of the Year, 2017

The stress of four years on the Board of Directors at my condominium association, as well as corporate President, took quite a toll on my physical & psychological health. As several professionals I dealt with through those four years have said, “No good deed goes unpunished”.

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What retirement looks like…years later

Google View of BTS — Screen Capture From Google Maps of BTS

I “retired” in 2012-13 from both my travel agency and my social media marketing consultancy. We bought a condo in Burien WA in 2013 and the move was strenuous and complicated. From making the offer to closing to moving and settling in, it was not an easy transition.

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Monday morning coffee shop observations

A morning of people watching in a coffee shop …..

A cool fall morning in Seattle is like no other place. Go into a coffee shop, have a cappuccino and watch as the city awakens. People watching can be a most interesting hobby.

There is the homeless person who buys a mocha latte in the coffee shop so (s)he can sit quietly in the corner and sleep in relative safety. Across the room the unemployed, well-suited, well-soled job seeker, with his nervous cup of java, reviews yet one more time his resume and the job description. Will this be his lucky cup of joe and his lucky day?

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Song of the ironwood tree

In going back through old documents, I am finding things I wrote quite a long time ago. This is one retrospective I wrote as a catharsis nearly 30 years ago:

Funny what will imprint on the mind when the waves of life come crashing in on your shore.

“A young woman stands under an ironwood tree on a remote Pacific island and the sound of the wind through the ironwood is neither melodious nor discordant. It is the sound of her precarious hold on her marriage flushing down the toilet.

What makes a person so intent on controlling both the horizontal and the vertical that she will put herself in such a position? Her husband was to go and visit with his lover to tell her he is going to try (once more) to make his marriage work. His wife, the young woman, stands under the ironwood tree feeling alienated and out-of-control as she watches him clasp the “other woman” into his body to say good bye.”

“CUT”!

That scene just isn’t working.

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