TGIF

My husband and I went to a vintage camper show this past week.  What a hoot!  We were lusting over the beautiful homes on wheels with all the period decor and furniture.  Campers mostly from the 1940s and 50s.  Such nostalgia.  I only camped in a camper one time: around 10 years old when an aunt and cousins joined up with my mom and us to camp at Big Basin.  I have fond memories of that trip.  At ten years old, it was like playing house for days!

Later in the week, I pulled an all nighter. Fueled by gawd knows what electric juice, I stayed up until 5:00 a.m. putting this book together:  The People of Cuba.  Images from my  March 2015 trip, I focused on showing people instead of buildings and places.  The book is large format, hardcover, so it sells for a whopping $63.  That's no profit on my part.  Zip. Zilch.  It's just too damned complicated to set up a site as an official 'seller' with tax ID number etc. etc.

I received a grand compliment from a photographer friend, that makes me blush to think of it.  I am indeed proud of the work in the book, and proud that I stuck with the project.  You can purchase a PDF copy for a mere $4.99.

In other news, I realize now that our next trip will be upon us before we know it.   House/dog sitter is secured, travel arrangements made.  France and Spain, here we come!  I expect to fall in love with France in particular -- how could I not?  Barcelona will be our only destination in Spain and I am looking forward to meeting our friend L. who lives there.  High on the must see list is the Picasso museum and the Joan Miro museum.  Not to mention the off-beat Gaudi buildings.

Once again, the advantages of retirement are glaringly bright.  I can pull an all nighter and not worry about how I'm going to function the next day.  It's been 5.5 years now and the work dreams are getting fewer and fewer.  Sometimes they still crop up and take me by surprise.  Dreams are a weird and wonderful thing to me.  I used to keep a journal of them, for many years.  I dreamed two doozies this week; in one I was having an all-out brawl with one of my sisters, and the other involved watching a man 'surfing' down a mountain only to loose his balance and go flying off the cliff.  His scream was chilling and I knew he was falling to his death.  Still can't get that scream out of my head.

Must be all the uncertainty around the state of our nation and world that's got me so riled up.  Time to bury myself in a novel.  I just picked up Be Frank With Me: A Novel  by Julia Claiborne Johnson (thank you Elizabeth for the recommendation).

I hope you have a Happy Weekend, with no nightmares! That's what I'll be aiming for.

It's not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. 

It is part of being alive, something we all share.      ~Pema Chodron