Hope to have some new photos to share by the end of the weekend of the completed (fingers crossed!) addition to the cottage. It’s such a lovely space.

The weather got hot and humid and I got a smidge grumpy about the balancing act of sorting, organising, listing, donating, and making stacks of things to list on ebay. The cottage is air conditioned — the studio is not. And I am working in the studio most of the time. Hmmm — not a happy little gal in the heat.

Bear with me — I’ll be back soon!

I’ve been reading with interest and dismay about the strikes in Europe that are playing havoc with the travel and tourism industry. First the museum workers in France went out on strike and as of today, the employees of the Pompidou Center are in their 4th week of that action.

I understand that their concerns are primarily the staffing numbers since plans are afoot in France to only replace one out of every two retiring museum employees. Common sense leads me to believe that they have some very valid points, but consider the time period that they have chosen for this — at the end of the year just as the holidays arrive and tourists are flocking to France for a break. It is quite likely that they have chosen this period specifically for the sheer amount of pain that it will inflict on the French government, but the cost to individual small business owners and the French tourism industry as a whole will be inestimable.

Let’s also look at it from a traveller’s point of view. People who may have saved for the trip of a lifetime to Paris, couples on a romantic break or a honeymoon, families on their annual winter holiday — all of those have paid and packed and travelled only to find that they could NOT (for awhile at least) gain entry to the Louvre, Versailles, the Pompidou Center, the Musee D’Orsay, or many other museums due to the ongoing strike.

Now British Air employees are threatening a 12 day shut down beginning 3 days before Christmas and the British baggage handlers have jumped on board and are planning to initiate their own strike at major airports beginning on the same day that the British Air staff go out on the 22nd of December.

Several articles in online travel publications have noted that there will most likely not be any refunds issued to travellers who had purchased tickets on British Air and if those travellers haven’t purchased travel insurance that reimburses them, then they’re out of luck and out of pocket. And since it is the peak of ‘high season travel’ for the airlines industry, it is rather unlikely that anyone, casual or business traveller alike, will find it easy to book alternative tickets on another carrier at a cost remotely like the advance purchase fares that many of these people would have had.

One group casualty of the British Air strikes are the 1,000 young musicians from the USA who were meant to travel to London to perform in the New Year’s Day Parade. One spokesman for the group told the BBC news reporter, “They have funded their own travel costs, many working long hours at the weekend and throughout holidays, to make their dream of performing in London come to fruition.”

But wait — there’s more!

The Eurostar drivers and on-board staff have ALSO decided to strike this coming weekend and again on the 26th and 27th of December thus reducing even further the available methods of travelling between England and Europe in the weeks ahead.

As of the 10th of December, commuters on the RER train lines in Paris were feeling the effects of an ongoing work slowdown.

And finally — in a case that is not actually a strike but a case of insolvency, Scotland’s largest air carrier Flyglobespan has collapsed leaving over 4,500 passengers stranded and 800 staff out of work a week before Christmas. Add the British Air strike and the Eurail strike to this mix and there are a lot of would-be travellers that have a snowflake’s chance in hell of having the holiday or even the business trip that they had planned.

I can’t ever remember a year when forces conspired to make travel so difficult in one short period — and all clumped into one smallish area of the globe. My sympathies go out to any affected passenger who is dealing with this.

I actually have very little sympathy for the strikers. No matter how much they wish to make a point, this important time of year for many families is certainly not the time to list their demands and lock things down. I rather think that there are few travellers who will look kindly on the staff at British Air, Eurostar, RER in Paris, the baggage handlers in Britain, and the remaining museum strikers in Paris at any point in the future. What they WILL remember is how utterly ruined their plans were and how devastated they may have felt when they realised how very little recourse they had.

You know those lists I wrote about in the last post? Those marvelous time management tools that soothe the brain as you tick off item after item and you accomplish things in an orderly manner? Well, even list-makers such as myself have to flow with life sometimes when you have the most fabbo schedule that decides to all-fall-down due to external factors.

Things began to go pear-shaped when I got my proof copy of my 3rd Edition of The Dreamkeeper Messages in the post and my knees just about buckled when I noticed that the headers were completely illegible and the first 4 lines of each page were so faded that you had to strain your eyes to read them.

What??? Surely my long-time-publisher Lulu couldn’t be letting me down like this!!!

For the last two weeks there has been a flurry of correspondence back and forth until it was determined that people who were ordering my book in the USA were getting a perfect copy, but people who were ordering in Australia were getting a wonky one. Apparently the computer program decided it didn’t want to ‘play nicely’ with the printing machinery and it kept producing errors. That has all been sorted out now and we are back on track. So thank you to everyone at Lulu — especially Monica in Customer Service — for getting it all resolved.

In the middle of the kerfuffles with the printing, Darling Husband had to be raced to the hospital with some kind of allergy and anaphylactic shock issue. He’s fine now, but what a fright he gave me!

And yes, that threw off the final editing of the next book by over a week.

Soooooooo — I am hoping to have the Smashwords version of the next book up within a week and the print book available at Lulu within the next 10 days.

Fingers crossed!!!

Laughing as I type this, in the real-life-as-a-metaphor-for-spiritual-life state, I am awash with water right outside our doorstep (more on that shortly). But in examining the spiritual-metaphysical aspects, I am awash with change.

I have just completed a book, I have another book percolating which is 3/4 done, I survived the scary hospitalization 2 weeks ago and recognized the transformative and clarifying power of the pain, and our life has just kicked up a notch activity wise. I also feel awash with possibilities and potential right now and as a result, I am more fully engaged in creating than I have been for rather a long time. Ideas and images are just springing into my brain at all hours of the day and night.

And about the real world state? Awash — the ground outside our newly constructed cottage is simply awash with water! And since we have a type of soil that is classified as ‘sticky clay’ (and that’s an official term from both the Shire Council and the men who did our foundations), the ground just swells and repels all efforts to drain away. And if you try to have driveway gravel delivered and installed this time of year, it just SUCKS into the sticky-clay and disappears. Charming!

We moved in on June 1st, right at the beginning of winter here in Australia — and for almost four months now it has rained, rained, rained, and (one more time for emphasis!) RAINED!!!

After last year’s devastating bushfire season and the accompanying loss of lives and properties all over Victoria, it’s hard not to sound curmudgeon-like when you have a bit of a whinge about non-stop water. And I know that the farmers in our area are practically dancing in the paddocks from relief.

But landscaping? Forget about it! There is no way to plant trees and shrubs in a downpour, so the cottage exterior is still rather sad and naked. And the tile surface has yet to be installed on the back veranda since you can’t really do that in a horizontal rain with gale force winds.

So, tucked up snug and warm in the wee little eco-cottage, I allow the state of well-being to (I know, I know — but I can’t help myself!) WASH over me again as I end this and head over to another screen to do some editing.

Deborah — living in the flow (giggle!)