Purple People Pleaser

     Yes, that's what I am, a "one-eyed one-horned flying purple people pleaser".  Okay, okay, I really have two eyes, I can't fly, and I'm relatively hornless, but I'm actually wearing purple and I'm definitely a hopeless people-pleaser.  The problem is, I sincerely like helping people, but eventually, helping everyone all the time turns into servilely pleasing them, and then a downfall of your own slavish existence. 

     I'm like the character, Jane, in 27 Dresses -- I just can't say no.  And like Jane, too many people wanting too many things from you is exhausting and tends to cause emotional blowups.  That's where I am today -- Emotional  Explosion Day.  If one more person asks me to do one more thing for them, I will be a volcanic disaster -- just call me Vesuvius. . .Sigh, And yes, the answer is yes; I'll do your favor anyway. . .!!

"London Calling..."

One word: LONDON.  I don't know what it is, but the thought gives me warm fuzzies in my heart.  Now don't get me wrong--Paris, Rome, Dublin--they all sound lovely, but there is just something about England that makes me want to drop a few thousand bucks to take pictures with Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Stonehenge, the Hogwarts castle, the Temple of Apollo (please see Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice, best-proposal-in-the-rain-ever scene, if you haven't already...), and maybe even the queen, but we'll see.

. . .And as long as I'm in London (whenever I get there), I may as well "take pictures" of those other lovely European places, right?. . .

The breath-taking Colosseum in Rome, Italy

Romantic Venetian Gondolas; Venice, Italy

Le Louvre Magnifique!  Paris, France

The enchanting Faerie Glen in Scotland

Someday, these pictures will be taken with my camera, by me.  Someday. . .isn't that the worst word in the world?  Someday.  So indefinite.  So unreliable.  But someday, "someday" has to come true, doesn't it?  So I will plan and wait until somehow, my "someday" plans can be fulfilled.  So someday, London, Europe -- here I come.


For backpacking across Europe, see this site for estimated expenses, travel tips, and discount ideas.
To plan an escorted or independent tour around Europe, click here.

The Wonderful World of Books

I think books must be the creatures God didn't make, so we could make them ourselves. Creatures?, you ask dubiously. No, you're right. I don't like that classification either. They are more like souls. Yes, souls with superior memories, holding onto thousands of years of history and millions of people's thoughts that would have died with their owners had they not been preserved between the pages of books. Books are souls that can inspire and arouse a full range of human emotion--laughter, tears, anger, peace, a desire to change. They can open your soul and contain parts of it too.

"'Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?' Mo had said...'As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells. . .and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower. . .both strange and familiar.'"*

Books are not souls you say? Maybe not like yours and mine. Maybe books don't live, or breathe, or think. . .but they help us to live and cause us to think. No, not souls on their own, perhaps, but pieces of the readers who lent their souls to the pages.

*Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke