Temporary Housewife

Let's start with our port city of Vancouver.  We had the best taxi driver who doubled as a tour guide, giving us the ultimate scoop on Vancity.  The place was just beautiful and green and reminded me a lot of good ol' Wisconsin but with slightly cooler architecture and way better weather.  Sure, it gets pretty gray and rainy during the winter, but with very mild winters and summers?  Sold. Well, not exactly.  Apparently you have to be in the 1% to live there.  Even small houses in the area are a million smackers. I took some pictures of this lovely city.  So buckle up!   Here is a wastebasket.  Why did I take a picture of a wastebasket?  Because they have a compost bin ATTACHED.  How forward thinking, Canada! This was a tasty Canadian beer.  It was some sort of a pale ale and I recall enjoying it very much. This is my daughter and MIL laughing together, which marked the beginning of a very good vacation wh...

As promised, this is a post about a cruise, but it is not the cruise that you may expect. No, my friends.  For if you are to appreciate the magnitude of this recent cruise, you must first get a little bit of backstory.  People who have known me 20 years knows this story, for it has been told during the decades and has likely passed into legend.  A legend of threats of fire, burning hot pipes, AA meetings, and an unfortunate encounter with the wrong side of a very large bird.  Or was it a mammal? What could all these things have in common?  Two words: Caribbean cruise. Let me take you to circa 2001, when my sister and I were fresh buds of young flowering women, waiting to bloom under the warm sun of life and the nourishment of experience.  With the backing of our loving parents, we were offered the opportunity to sail through some early life tribulations with a nice cruise in the Caribbean, wile away our time sipping daiquiri's, gorge on the main buffe...

I really want to write about the cruise, and I will, I promise.  But something larger has been looming and I feel compelled to write about it, if only to clear my head while also trying to help others.  Know this might be triggering for people like me, so read with care. I can't write when I'm in the middle of an episode.  I can't do much of anything while in an episode.  And I'm not quite out of it yet, but I'm far enough from the eye of the storm to sit down and write about my experience. I have bipolar disorder with a panic disorder.  It means that the everyday ups and downs of people without bipolar can be magnified to a trillion for me.  It means that the everyday ruminations and moments of panic that we all feel is also the proverbial mountain out of a molehill for me. This last episode I liken to driving on the highway of life, following my GPS, using my turn signals, getting the occasional fit of road rage, that sort of thing.  Do you guy...