Not yet.

My son Matt is my favourite, that is, only travel companion. When I don’t go alone I go with him, usually to Boston (Quincy) to visit my daughter, his sister, who is very good to him and so is Jonathan, her husband, who is his favourite brother. Matt is wonderful to travel with: he is patient and never complains, no matter the delays, and you know what they’re like now: the line-ups, the kiosks (and I never seem to punch the right buttons and have to do it again), the boarding passes (scrutinized), the passports (ditto), t he shoes (off), the bags (open), the shaving cream (confiscated), the water bottle (abandoned), on and on and on. It’s an obstacle course and as we traverse it, Matt says “Are we having fun yet?”

Not yet.

But it has become a standing joke and it comes in very handy when we run into a real delay, in fact a set- back , like a cancelled flight. Are we having fun yet? Not yet.

Shortly after I was widowed I got involved with a Dream Group: only four women, not frequent, so not onerous. We had to report our dreams, of course, for shared analysis. I usually do not remember my dreams, the REM or moving pictures of the final stage of sleep; most people don’t. They vanish the moment you wake up, with some exceptions, but that’s another discussion. While I was hanging with the Dream Ladies I recalled my dreams - and quickly recognized the pattern, the story-line. One way or another they were all obstacle courses: going some place by various vehicles but always with obstacles, some of them quite forbidding and dangerous.

That’s what travel is like now. Life, too.

Now it’s the eighteenth. I owe you/me a lot. Might just get something done. Blogs provide an inexorable measure of time.

The American poet Edna St.Vincent Millay, said, Life “was not so much "one damn thing after another" as "the same damn thing over and over" (from an October 1930 letter to Arthur Davison Ficke) [I don’t know who he is, either.]

Yes, well, that’s how I feel right now. I keep messing up with computer business. My neighbour came to help me and there I was again, caught up in an endless loop (the same damn thing over and over.) I think it’s clear now. All I was trying to do was activate a Presto card (TTC).

Next, I tried to send a book to relatives in England, I chose three books, two for me. then I singled out the one I wanted to send to Tim and Beth, making it very clear, I thought, that this was going to a separate address from the billing address. Instead my two books have been sent to Tim and Beth.and the other one has disappeared. I ordered cancel immediately but they were too fast. So I wrote the e-mail acknowledgement I received and said STOP. Too late. so I wrote Tim and Beth to warn them and then I wrote the bookseller again and asked what to do, and my contact was vague: either refuse or return. If the books return they will refund, otherwise, they’re in limbo somewhere.

I can’t stand it. I’m not going to shop online any more.