IN PRAISE OF A SMILE!

A smile can light up an uninteresting face and make it look beautiful. A smile is a gift – both for the person smiling and the one being smiled at. Share a smile with somebody while you are going through a particularly bad time and you immediately feel better. Anybody can smile – when you are in the depths of depression, let a smile break through and it will brighten your life just as the sun breaking out from behind the clouds on a dull and miserable day suddenly brightens everything up.

You can share a smile with anyone: even exchanging a smile with a stranger in the street can instantly brighten your day. But the most important smiles are the ones shared with the people we love. A smile from them confirms the love they have for us. It makes us feel safe and important.

Surely we have a right to expect those who love us to smile at us. But what if they don’t? What if they think their life is such a disaster that they cannot be bothered to make the effort to smile? The person they live with will surely feel unappreciated and very easily be drawn into the miserable mood. Living with someone who will not smile is awful. We owe it to those we live with to make the effort to smile and brighten their llives; in doing so, our own will surely be brightened too.

OUR DOG SANDY.

Our golden retriever Sandy will be 14 in December and has had 2 cancerous lumps removed in the past.

This summer, he started losing some blood from near his bottom and we could see a little lump there. Every time he sat there was bood on the carpet – not good news for either Sandy or my carpets! The vet gave him antibiotics and for a while the problem seemed a bit better, then suddenly got worse – just before we were going to Kef. Our daughter was away on a hen weekend in Edinburgh, but I had no option other than to go away on the Sunday and leave the problem for her to deal with.

On arriving in Kef I spent several days worrying about Sandy. News from our daughter was sketchy, but I didn’t press her. Apart from text messages, we never got to phone her until the Monday of the second week but she indicated then that Sandy was ok and sitting beside her. I had a vague suspicion that there was something else she wasn’t telling me, but again I didn’t press her.

When I got home, I learned that Sandy had had an operation to remove the lump – I think it was on the Wednesday of the first week. When our daughter went to pick Sandy up, the vet was busy with an emergency but left a note with the receptionist to say that during the operation he found a large mass in Sandy’s stomach. Our poor daughter was in tears.

Our vet is a really lovely guy (when we first met him our poor daughter really liked him and was originally heartbroken to learn that he was about to be married). He phoned our daughter later and apologised profusely for not being there. He explained that although Sandy didn’t have a full anaesthetic his breathing wasn’t all that good. Then the vet found this big mass in his stomach. He said he thought Sandy would not survive another operation to remove the lump. Pressed by our daughter, he gave Sandy only 4 to 6 months to live.

When Sandy went back to have his stitches removed, there was no consulting room available so the vet actually saw Sandy and my daughter outside the building. He said that the tests on the lump he removed had showed that it was not actually malignant (I think he had believed all along that it was going to be another cancer). He was very surprised to see that Sandy had recovered really quickly from the operation and was full of beans! He said then that Sandy has surprised him in the past and that he could well be wrong about how much time he has left.

That was at the beginning of July, over two months ago. Sandy still appears remarkably well and is still enjoying his life very much. He truly is living up to his pedigree name of Magic Mystery.

IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME!

Since I last spoke to you, summer has come and almost gone. Not that we had much summer here in the UK: at least not as far as people like me who love to swim in the sea are concerned. I only swam once here all summer.

I was very lucky though and had pretty good weather for my 3 trips abroad. Kefalonia especially was hot and beautiful as ever, although even that was a little windy from time to time. One of the highlights was seeing a turtle for the first time in Kef, swimming in the water in Argostoli. (We took a video of it which I will post here later). So, a good summer with lots of sun for me. I didn’t want the travelling to stop and, as usual, didn’t want to leave Kef. Mind you, the journey home was interesting as we followed the coast of Greece northwards on to Albania, Montenegro and Croatia, with a lovely view of the numerous Croatian islands – and I was able to spot Rovinj (which is unmistakeable from the air if you know it). We then flew near Venice and I was able to see the campsites on the peninsula nearby – one of which we stayed in last May. So, I was able to track the paths of our 2009 travels from the air!

My husband had his 7-week sabattical from work and enjoyed himself very much. We had some good days out in Eastbourne and some good walks with our dog. Hubby was given a season ticket for the local cricket team for his 60th in January, so spent quite a bit of time on that this summer too. I hate cricket and, although it is good to see him enjoying himself and he certainly deserves to have some time doing stuff he enjoys, if I am honest I really wish he wasn’t getting so into cricket again! That’s just me being selfish though……

Since the travelling ended, I have really been in something of an escapist, reality-avoiding mood. I started playing a game called MyFarm on Facebook and really, really got addicted to planting crops, harvesting and selling them and gradually building up a very pretty farm (with lots of trees and flowers) I love my farm and wish I could run away and live there lol! It is a pretty much self-limiting thing because, once you get to a certain level, there really isn’t all that much point in carrying on, but it has served its purpose for me and provided an escapist outlet at a time when I just wanted to hide from life and its problems for a while. Many people reading this will no doubt think that online farming is a sad pursuit – although it has to be said that my daughter tesed me mercilessly for several weeks but eventually signed up just to help me when I needed another neighbour. She has since become completlely addicted herself though, more so than I ever was! It can be a fairly sociable pursuit as you can harvest and plough for other people and get them to do the same for you. My daughter has actually made a good friend via FarmTown, a Greek girl who is studying in the US at the moment. They get on really well and my daughter may even stay with her when she goes back to Cyprus.

As for other news on my errant offspring, my daughter has had no work at all from the agency for several weeeks but now it is beginning to pick up again. Otherwise, she is plodding along much the same as ever. Son is a real problem at the moment though…… he is really the most miserable persson in the whole world. It is a shame there isn’t a prize competition for the title, because he would win it without a doubt. He hates his job and thinks his life is s***t, basically. My daughter is unhappy with her life too, but at least you get lots of smiles from her and I can have a laugh with her. With my son though, there is just misery and no smiles at all. He seems to be very angry too: sometimes if feels as if he is angry with us, although it isn’t our fault he got himself into a job he hates so much! I said to him just this morning that if he hates work so much he should at least try to look for something else, but all I got in response is that he doesn’t know what else to do. “Well then” I said, “If you don’t even try to get something else you are gonna stay miserable for ever!”

I know it is horrible to be in a job you hate, but I do think he should make more effort to make himself amenable to us. He dosn’t even try to smile and be pleasant. He is happy enough to live in our house, eat our food and borrow our money when he gets into debt, so I think he should make more effort for us. At the moment, to be honest, I am really feeling as if I dislike the boy, even though I know that underneath I still love him! I had a jolly good cry when he left for work this morning…… it shouldn’t be like that though, should it?

Apart from offspring problems, I am not too bad healthwise, although I have had some eye problems recently, as well as the usual ear ones. It has unfortunately been a very bad summer for me as far as exercise and diet is concerned – I got so fed up exercising and dieting without getting anywhere that I just needed to give up both for a while. In some ways, it has done me good…… although definitely not as far as my waistline is concerned! So now, the plan is to start all over again, hopefully with a more successful strategy this time! At the moment though, starting it all up again is proving a very slow process. I just do not want to do it!

Anyway, I have pretty much got you up to date with everything in my life now (apart from some news about our dog Sandy and that really merits a separate post).

See you later……