Finally, it’s that time of the year again…hockey season. I’m really looking forward to playing again. Last year I played two seasons back to back with the women’s league then the B Grade non-contact. It was great for my skills to play for a year non-stop, but hard on my body.

I’m hoping that the six-month break will have rested my poor old frame long enough to see the season out. Non-contact hockey is not at all dangerous so I have no worries about injury, but hockey in general is a very physical sport – you use a lot of muscles racing up and down the ice chasing after that puck! I’ve been trying to prepare myself with running and gym classes, but there really is no form of exercise that matches the demands of hockey.

This year we have a new team member, my daughter Megan. She’s been skating a few months now, and is already at least as good a skater as I am. And hockey is a great way to improve your skating skills – you go hard-out and you soon forget that you’re skating as you become immersed in the action. If you fall over, it (mostly) doesn’t hurt with all the padding you wear.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
–Steve Jobs

It’s September 11 in New Zealand today. It’s been 10 years since the World Trade Centre towers came down. It’s a big anniversary for Americans, and I’m sure for many others. Kia kaha.

But for me now September 11 will just be the day after Simon died. Two years on, I have mixed emotions. Last year it just hurt. This year I feel a little differently. I have a sense of relief on his behalf. He was in so much pain, so sick. And he struggled against death. It was hard to see that. So now I feel like I can celebrate his life. I can remember what a great guy he was – so clever, funny, kind – without the pain of missing him (so much). I guess I’ve moved on from that immediate grief.

I have this other feeling that’s hard to pin down. It’s something like a sense of discomfort around expressing my feelings of grief and loss for Simon, who was my best friend for 10 years, now that I’m married to my new best friend. I can’t put my finger on exactly what about all this makes me uncomfortable, but it does (just a little). It certainly has nothing to do with Stephen or Simon, they met a few times and liked each other well enough. Simon was glad that I’d found someone to be happy with. Maybe this is how widows feel when they get remarried.

Now that the weather is warming up and it’s lighter at night, I’ve been running more. I love running. It’s my “off” switch – the thing that allows me to unwind and keep my emotions and stress levels on an even keel.

So tonight my run route took me past the Palms (our local shopping mall). When we decided to buy our house, we smugly noted how close we’d be living to the Palms – only a couple of blocks away. Well, it’s been closed the whole time we’ve lived here. It was badly damaged in the February earthquake, and then again in June. It was so disheartening. We didn’t realise how much we took it for granted, just being able to pop down for coffee, or for groceries, or to pick up this or that from K-Mart.

Anyway, the point that I’m getting to is that the Palms is finally reopening! Tomorrow! It feels like a huge step forward. As I ran passed the security guards stationed all around the carpark entrances (about 10 of them, not sure why) I was grinning from ear to ear. They all smiled back. They know what it means. We are moving on. Things are getting better. Not the same. Not normal. But better than they were.

I continued on my run, and noticed that the portaloos that usually lined the streets around our house are gone (most of them anyway). And the septic tanks that stood in the street for people to empty their chemical toilets into are also gone. It made me really happy.

I quite like this idea of a bucket list – all the things you want to do before you die.

I have lots of things that I’d really like to see and do. My bucket list items change over time as I tick things off and think of new things I’d like to accomplish. In the past couple of years I’ve completed a whole bunch of stuff.

I always wanted to have my own car and be able to drive. Tick.
I always wanted to own a diamond ring. Tick.
I dreamed of traveling the world. Tick.

And then there are the little things. When I first started skating, I imagined one day being good enough to speed skate in the public sessions. I really never thought I’d be good enough. But tonight, there I was, zooming around the rink with the wind whistling in my ears. I wasn’t the fastest out there, not by a long shot. But I was doing it, going as fast as I dare. What a great feeling.

Where will you be on February 29th, 2012? You probably have no idea. I know where I’ll be. All going well, I’ll be on a plane with Stephen, on our way to London.

Last weekend we booked our plane tickets and rental car for our honeymoon in the UK. By the time we get to next February, it will have been the hardest, strangest year I’ve lived through. So much has happened it makes my head spin.

So I’m ridiculously excited about the idea of mooching around England and Wales with my beloved. We have only a rough itinerary, so we will go where the mood takes us. We can live in a fun little love bubble for three weeks, and have the newly-wed break away we should have been able to have after we got married. Better late than never!

It’s been a great weekend. On Friday, I got home from work to a shiny new dishwasher. We had purchased a dishwasher a couple of months ago, and had been patiently waiting for the joiner and plumber to be available to install it. They’ve been a bit busy doing other more important things no doubt.

The joiner also took out a cupboard in the kitchen, creating a space big enough for our ‘fridge – it was previously in the laundry. It makes a huge difference to my general happiness to have these two things fixed.

And then, just to add to my general joy in life we noticed that our water pressure had been restored in the kitchen. We figured that it was related to the plumber tinkering with our pipes. But then Stephen went out the back yard and noticed silt all over the back path. He took a look in the drain and voila…no silt!

We’ve been waiting for almost five months (and expect to be waiting for many more) to have someone look at our drains at the back of the house, so this was very exciting news. I ran the shower in our ensuite bathroom to test it. The water drained away. We had a working ensuite! The City Council, as a part of the work they’ve been doing fixing the sewer pipes, have also been blowing silt out of lateral water pipes. It doesn’t sound like a big deal really, but to me, this is HUGE news. We moved into our broken home fully prepared for a long haul before it would be fixed. These small things feel like moving on. They are epic luxuries.

So I got an invite to Google+ today (thank you Julio, and Dan too). It’s supposed to be an answer to those who are fed up with Facebook. We will see.

My first impressions are that it’s a mashup between Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Which should be a good thing for me, since I use all three of these social networking media every day. With G+ I can upload photos, broadcast my location, chat with other Plusers, and put people into groups (called circles). I’m not sure why I want to be putting people in circles, or the consequences of this.

Like other social networking services at their birth, it’s not very exciting – there aren’t really enough people using it to make it interesting yet. But then Facebook and Twitter suffered from this too for a long time before they went mainstream. I signed up for Facebook as soon as it became possible to, in 2006. I didn’t know anyone else using it. Not really the point of a social network. I went back to MySpace, where everyone was hanging out at the time.

I joined Twitter in 2007. Same problem there. My usage didn’t take off until around mid-2009, when enough of my friends discovered the joys of tweeting. And it wasn’t until the September 2010 earthquake that Twitter became more than just another internet byway for me.

So, is Google+ the amazing new replacement for Facebook? Part of me hopes so. I like Facebook well enough, but it’s become cluttered. My news feed is full of updates about games that my friends and family are playing. If I want to see what they are actually up to, I have to spend inordinate amounts of time blocking all these apps from my feed. Let’s hope Google stays away from games.

I like that G+ links to Picasa for photo sharing. I used Picasa a lot back in the day. It connected directly to my iPhoto library for easy sharing – much as Facebook does now.

I’m not sure how I feel about the integration of my social networking. I use Facebook and Twitter for different things. There is some crossover of people, but for the most part Twitter is for friends and Facebook is for family. My Facebook profile is certainly more family-friendly. Twitter is like the wild west – anything goes. I’m not sure where G+ would fit.

Google Plus is a closed network at the moment – available by invitation only. Ostensibly this is to keep the network manageable for Google while they get it up and running. But really, I think this staged release is a way of building buzz around the new app. And it works. The geeks have jumped in first. They will blog and tweet and chat about it, and this will make others curious. Are you curious? Probably just a little, like me.

 

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in the world by mistake.