It Was the Best of Vacations, It Was the Worst of Vacations

October 12, 2011

Best-laid plans often go astray and are most unwelcome when they happen on vacation.

Here is a brief synopsis of our September trip to France and England.

What we expected to see in France and on a river boat through six locks on the Seine:

Quick French Lessons, Anyone?

September 12, 2011

How could you take a trip to France if you didn’t know the language?

I wish my parents had taught me another language when I was young. Then today I might be able to speak foreign words, even if I didn’t speak them fluently. However, my ears seem deaf to the pronunciation of non-English words.

What will I do when we take a boat ride down the Seine later this week? I feel particularly anxious because I have always been puzzled by French. Every word seems to have letters they don’t pronounce!

Consequently, I’ve never felt comfortable ordering a French dish off the menu, afraid I will sound terribly uncultured (aren’t cultured people always supposed to speak French?).

Living in Southern California we often eat at Mexican restaurants and though I don’t speak Spanish, at least in that language words are almost always pronounced the way they’re spelled. That is not true for French, as far as I can tell (though a man I know who speaks several languages says English is the worst in that regard).

Anyway, if I feel unprepared to order French dishes here in the United States, what will happen when I get to Paris and am faced with a menu that will expose my linguistic limitations?

That’s why I’ve decided to aim for a middle ground. Every day I am practicing some words from Rick Steve’s French, Italian and German Phrase Book, focusing on basic words for meeting and greeting and ordering food. Now I feel at least a bit less anxious and have a place I can look up words with easy pronunciation guides.

I am starting with phrases like C’il vous plait (pronounced see voo play), meaning “please”. Without the help of the phrase book, I would have pronounced that as “see-ill vous plate.”

I have also memorized Parlez-vous anglais (pronounced par-lay-voo ahn-glay). Now I can ask, “Do you speak English, please?” Imagine I shall use it frequently!

Preparing for a More Relaxed Trip

September 8, 2011

When you are getting ready to leave home for a business or pleasure trip, how do you choose what you need to do and what can be left undone?

I have had a conundrum this week as I prepare for two weeks in Europe (yes, I know, it’s terribly painful, but someone has to do it to keep the travel industry alive).

In the past, wanting to make the maximum use of any time I had before  leaving, I would put pressure on myself to have “evergreen” posts completed before I left. You can see the last post, Viewing Time as an Ocean, for an explanation of the term. Writing at least three posts a week seemed necessary.

Now, as I said in that post,  I am trying to stop viewing time like a bullet train I have to catch. Yet whether seen through flowing water in an ocean or the window of a train, there is limited time to complete tasks I want done. And it has struck me that there is one thing I’ve been forgetting: setting aside time to learn more about my video camera so I can take the kinds of pictures I can turn into several videos for my websites.

Something has to go and I’ve decided it will be writing enough evergreen posts for three a week. Instead, I can manage two a week (Mondays and Thursdays) of  various videos or photos I’ve enjoyed finding on the Internet recently, and a couple unpublished articles I’ve had around for awhile.

So during September come here and be inspired and/or entertained. As the theme for this blog says, enrich your life, enrich your relationships. I think these will do that for you.

Enter Sharing-Great-Fishing-Memories Raffle

July 6, 2011

Do you have a good fishing story to share?

This post introduces a new raffle I am calling the Vacation Memories Raffle Series I got the idea when I was sorting through some imagery scripts to include in an upcoming training program for therapists, and I had written one in which a person remembers a pleasant experience from long ago and re-experiences those good feelings today.

This brief post focuses on one particular vacation activity, fishing, because most of us have gone fishing at one time or another. Maybe it was only fishing with our grandparents at a small stocked pond. Maybe you’ve gone with a group of fishing enthusiasts in the ocean. Whatever or wherever you’ve fished, I am sure there is a special memory you have and I’d love to hear it.

Share your fishing story and I’ll enter you in a raffle for a print copy of my second book, Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life.

Here is my fishing story: Many decades ago, my father and I went fishing on a lake in Michigan and caught so many we were probably over the limit, if there were one. He couldn’t bait his own hook fast enough before I had another tug on the line and he had to remove my wriggling fish. I imagine I was about ten years old and remember it as a perfect day with my father.

Ordinarily, I had a somewhat difficult relationship with him because I wasn’t the easiest child to raise and he was an authoritative parent. But for that particular day, I was just a kid having fun. Whether it was a break from what I felt was more strictness than I wanted, or whether it was simply the pleasure of feeling I was a talented fisherman (we didn’t call them fisherwomen in those days), I can’t say. But the memory is a very good one and whenever someone talks about fishing, I think of that one day.

We had probably simply stumbled on a school of fish that just happened to be where we were dropping our lines. But seeing all those fish flopping on the bottom of the rowboat made me felt very special.

Never gone fishing? Maybe you’ve heard an old story about someone in your family  that seems particularly memorable.

And if you can’t think of any stories, wait for the next post in a couple days. I’ll have another vacation topic for you to share and you can enter another raffle for a free print copy of Healing Relationships is an Inside Job.

Getting Ready to Gather Memories

May 20, 2011

Looking forward to adding new experiences to my bank of pleasant memories.

Tomorrow I am leaving for Montana, where my oldest grandson is getting married! Now if anything makes me feel old, that does.

But I have a plan for how to keep myself feeling as young and alive as possible.

The idea comes from one of my Take-a-Breaks called “Capturing Moments for Memories” in which I explain how I consciously take a “photograph” of experiences for my memory bank:

When recently flying to a conference on comprehensive cancer care, I had to sit next to the window, although I generally prefer an aisle seat. Taking advantage of the situation, however, I decided to see how well I could remember a scene below. Pressing my face to the window, I would pay particular attention to some aspect of the countryside, trying to “capture” that picture in as many details as possible, something like taking a Polaroid snapshot, and then close my eyes. When I’d open them a moment later, I would check to see how accurate my memory had been. (Of course, I couldn’t wait too long to open them or the scene would have changed.)

Since it takes about fifteen seconds for the brain to absorb an experience so that it can later be remembered — I was taking about that long to play my game, I can still see in my mind’s eye much of the countryside over which I traveled.

The idea for capturing a moment is to become consciously aware of as many of your senses as possible — seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, tasting, and noticing the sensations in your body — while you experience whatever you are doing.

So for the next ten days I will focus my attention on whatever I am doing, whether flying, driving in the mountains of Montana, or visiting with new people who will now be part of my life.

I’m very excited. And the more excited I feel, the less ancient I feel. In fact, thinking about the generations that preparing for the future brings peace to my heart. I know that something of me with go with them.

I’ll probably tell you about some of this adventure when I return. But in the meantime, I have other posts uploaded, so be sure to come back here in a couple days and see a new video that I made called How to Become Your Own Expert on Personal Growth.

By the way, in case you are wondering, the groom on the cake is Scotch and that is traditional wedding attire. I doubt my grandson will be wearing that outfit, but what he will wear is anybody’s guess. However, I found the picture at Wikimedia, which often has a royalty-free picture to illustrate a post, and just couldn’t resist using it.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons