My first entry

OK - after all the promises to friends and family that I will start a blog, I am finally getting around to it. Today I offer you Chapter 1 of my early non-retiring retirement.

I cannot believe how the time has flown since my last day at work on December 9th. Of course the rest of the month was tied up with getting ready for Christmas and visitors. I hosted the Hawrylyshyn family at my house on December 25th - a change from usually doing the Ukrainian Christmas on January 6th. In fact this is the first time in about 15 years that I have had family dinner at my houseon the 25th thanks to all my fabulous relatives, especially those nieces and nephews who are carrying on family traditions.

Getting ready for Christmas forced me to do something I have been avoiding for the last few years; organize the house - after all there would be 11 or possibly 12 of us sleeping here, plus a dog and two cats. If you haven't been to my house, a small (1,000 sq. ft). three bedroom semi near downtown TO, with tons of furniture and boxes from past houses and a collection of Corrinnes clothes, papers and paraphernalia on top of mine. So I dragged out the garbage, recycle, and goodwill bags, pretended I was being bossed around by that woman who has the Neat show on HGTV and got to work. I've always known I was a pack rat, but don't think I realized quite how much, yeesh! Well, three recycle bags full of papers and magazines, six bags for goodwill and four more for garbage later, I could see the futon in the basement again and had made room in the smallest bedroom/office for a double size blow up and I was ready for the crowds. But what really astounded me was how cleansed I felt. All these years of collecting and storing things that I really didn't need. Wow getting rid of it was so uplifting - I was ready to tackle anything now!

And then the call came in from Vancouver. If I was willing to work for slave wages they would be happy to hire me as a Bilingual Customer Care Host at Vancouver Airport to work during the Olympics and Paralympics. Yay - I get to go to Vancouver and experience Olympic fever for the first time in my life. I cannot describe how excited I was to hear I was in.  Then the panic began to set in - where would I stay; what would I do with the cats, and the house; how fluent was my French; should I ship the car or rely on public transit; my mind swirled on and on. I started my To Do list and it grew and grew. How could I possibly manage all of this in less than three weeks!

Well, I've managed to get many things crossed off the list or at least scheduled to be done before I go. A friend of Corrinnes, Mark, will be house and cat-sitting, my teeth are cleaned, the nails will be poslished and in five more days I head out to Pearson as a passenger and arrive at YVR as an employee.There will begin the second chapter of my early non-retirement.

How life has its shifts and turns.