plugged-in shoes

My daughter is getting her Christmas tree today - it's November! I usually get mine, reluctantly, a week before the big day. There's a lot of Bah, Humbug around here, as there is not across town, where two small boys are waiting to begin opening their Advent calendars. I went to the mall a few days ago - before Black Friday, of course, when the place went insane - to buy what Eli wants for Christmas - shoes. Not just any shoes, of course - shoes that have a course of lights around the sole that light up in different colours. They cost $89 and you have to charge them with a charger, like a cellphone. I came home and plugged my grandson's shoes into my computer.

How to explain THAT to my father, who died in 1988?

However, just read a great article on how the western world is returning to analog, as opposed to digital. Books made of paper, records made of vinyl, typewriters - hooray! One year I'll get Eli a record player for Christmas. But not quite yet. I'm going over this afternoon to help decorate the tree, and then I'll go home before they get immersed in the Grey Cup. Lots of football fans in that house. And yet some of them are related closely to me.

Had lunch Thursday with three dear friends from the Y - Paul, friend since I started there in 1990, Carole, the gazelle who teaches my fave class, and Godana, just-retired Y employee, an Ethiopian who once coached an Olympic marathon runner. Carole, Paul and I wanted to touch base with this beautiful man, to be sure he doesn't disappear from our lives. We ate at Shalom, a new Ethiopian restaurant on Parliament Street - a big platter of food in the centre of the table that we ate with injera - a pancake-like bread full of holes. Godana showed us just how to do it. It was wonderful.

Teaching is over for the term. Six weeks off, which also means six weeks with no teaching income. But already, the calendar is pretty full. I emailed a personal essay to a magazine this week, which I haven't done for years. Time for work, time for fitness, time to sort out the chaos in the office and the basement - and time to sit around staring at the garden as it shuts itself down. For now.

Life is full of such promise, isn't it?