Sitting at a Chapters Starbucks savouring a bag of crunchy sweet BBQ kettle chips while sipping on a cool peach green tea lemonade. This experience is enhanced if you are sharing the moment with someone you love to be with. I’m addicted to this combo. In my defense, the bag of chips is small and mom and I have convinced ourselves they are healthy or at the very least, the lesser of all the Starbucks treat evils. My personal trainer sister mocked us for thinking, and worse yet, believing, that any bag of chips was healthy. But we don’t care, we’re gonna eat them anyway.
I’ve fallen in love with relaxing by the fire accompanied by some smooth jazz after a long, tedious and hard day. Who am I kidding? I like to do this everyday. I’m so impressed with, and grateful for, a fireplace that jumps to serve by the flick of a switch. I snuggle up in a chair close enough to absorb the heat and pretend to read a book. After I’ve read the same page 5 times I give myself up to the semiconscious snooze while the music soothes my subconscious appreciation.
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes or just outside a picture window for my viewing pleasure. I love listening to the silence of huge ash like flakes slowly and softly falling to the ground as they pass by the street light on their descent. This moment is enhanced if I can hear my favorite Christmas music playing in the background and I usually can as this festive music comes out at first snowfall. I can’t help myself.
I am soothed and healed by the sound of the waves crashing again the shore as I lay in bed next to my snoring husband, after a rushed and invasive trip across the Pacific Ocean. Once I hear those waves I know we have extracted ourselves from our stressful real lives and will be waking up to a slower pace in the morning. An existence with no alarm clocks or todo lists, knowing my toes and soles will be massaged by warm soft sand soon.
Walking into the floral boutique where my daughter spends her days. The shabby chic decor flush with flowers and the heavenly scent of roses, peonies and eucalyptus. I love watching the girls (the designers) quickly and adeptly gather together arms full of flowers and turn these into the most visually appealing arrangements. For the most part, it’s such a happy business.
It all started with the Sears Christmas Wish catalogue back when I was too young to shop for myself. My sisters and I would wait in eager anticipation of its arrival. Often my mom would withhold it and use it as a treat for some unfinished task. Plus we each got to enjoy it all by ourselves for the first peruse. Then once it was coffee table fodder my sisters and I would play a game we called ‘pick’. We would proceed to go through the catalogue page by page and take turns getting first pick of anything on that page. This was purely for entertainment but to this day we all love magazines. There is just something about actually turning those beautiful glossy pages filled with brilliant photography of beautiful and fun things that holds me captive. I also get many a fine creative idea from these magazines as well. I do have several magazine subscriptions sent to my iPad monthly but they are not quite as fun as hanging at chapters and browsing the real thing.
Zara may start with a Z but it’s the first name on my list when I’m at Chinook mall. I often go pick up my husband from his practice at Chinook and I’m usually there earlier than he gets off. The text he most often receives? ‘Hi honey. I’m at Zara’. They’ve conveniently located two couch areas directly in front of the stores doors for mike to sit when he is done and I am not. I’ve been to Zara in New York, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Paris, London, Venice, Rome, Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary so each time I am in one I feel like I’m on vacation in some glamourous locale and very often, I am. I can count on Zara to surprise and delight and stock the most current trends that I fall in love with in the aforementioned magazines.
Father of the Bride (Franc and that basketball hoop), You’ve got Mail (that quaint little bookstore and the New York brownstone) , Breakfast at Tiffanys (Audrey Hepburn and George Pepard and Moon River), It’s Complicated (that French bakery and coffee shop), Something’s Gotta Give (that glorious beach house), The Holiday (everything except Kate Winslets jerky ex boyfriend who makes me want to throw up in my mouth) White Christmas (and I fall asleep counting my blessings)….these are the movies I will watch anytime anywhere. I can’t get enough of them.
Continued….
The Red Plaid Apron 