Erin's Journals

Hello – and thank you for stopping by.
 
 
Just before we get to today’s journal, I thought I might try to entice you to bring the best parts of being on the road into your own living space (room service may not be included LOL). It’s hotel living at home and it’s my post this week on Walmart.ca.
 
I hope you’re having a good week and we look forward to sharing some memories of this trip through Tulip Time in Amsterdam and into Belgium, when I can post pictures and stories here on Monday. In the meantime, today, according to our itinerary, we dock in Antwerp, Belgium and then tomorrow we hit up three places in the Netherlands.
 
Please pardon me for not updating you daily here; I wasn’t sure about how I was going to time journals to post at the times I needed them to. And I can’t take a chance on one not going up.
 
I have read your comments, though, on Facebook daily in response to my journals: the hoaxes, Rob’s nose, the importance of travel – if you can swing it – as a family. And, oh, thank you for your response to last week’s journal about having to let go several emails that I had read but just hadn’t gotten to answering. I so appreciate your understanding.
 
One of the posts I got last week when I was in the midst of what I described as a massive bout of writer’s (writers’?) block was about chores. Actually, a few people wanted to know how Rob and I divide things. And the answer is: we kind of don’t. Even though, as someone suggested, the way things are divided up when you are married, or within the first year or so, are the way things stay, I couldn’t disagree more.
 
We’ve changed in so many ways since those early years – and not just in terms of working – that it would be impossible to nail down our tasks and stick to them. Things change. For example, in the beginning I did all of the cooking. Rob was almost invisible in the kitchen. But as time went on and my life got busier (or I was on one of my stupid diets again), he would fend for himself, for Lauren and sometimes for me in the kitchen. I guess he figured if he was going to eat anything besides cabbage soup, he would have to learn to prepare pasta and make a good sauce!
 
So, cooking is just one of the ways things have changed. Now we love to do prep together in the kitchen or if I’m busy writing on a deadline, he’ll get dinner together. Alternatively, if he’s editing to send out a voice job (I have an audio book we’ll be hunkering down for when we come back next week), I’ll get dinner prepared and then we’ll sit for a bit, catch up with the previous night’s catches on the PVR and then get back to work. We work a lot. Me tapping away writing words at the keyboard, him tapping away editing out spoken words at his keyboard. And making sure this journal gets done.
 
Laundry is mostly Rob’s domain because he’s the hockey player (seems fair). He also won’t even let me make the bed, so sure is he about the abilities his stepmom passed on as an RN. (He does do some pretty superb corners.) We have someone who comes in biweekly to clean, so there’s no dividing there, while Rob’s a Mr. Fix-it in every sense of the word.
 
So I guess, in answer to the question about chores, Rob really handles more of them than I do (including walking Molly if it’s really miserable or early or both). He’s still in charge of making coffee, while I try to be the one to clean out the machine and its parts. And we definitely grocery shop together. I even trust him to do it alone – something that took a very long time.
 
It’s an ebb and flow, a fluid kind of exchange of duties and chores. But there is one thing that has never changed: both of us are extremely grateful and neither takes the other for granted, no matter what. There is a thank you every single day for the coffees that he makes, for the meals that I make, for the cleanup after supper. None of it is “his job” or “my job.” That’s how we roll – and it’s worked.
 
And this week, my job is his job: meeting, greeting, entertaining and having fun. We’re lucky to have a partnership that works so well, so smoothly. Unless he leaves me for Cooper, and I’ll break that to you on Monday if it happens!
 
Come back here tomorrow for a journal about one of the best shows I’ve seen in absolutely ages. And if you’re lucky, you’ll have the chance to see some version of it, too.
  

Today, according to our itinerary, we arrive in Ghent, Belgium at 6 am for a day of tours and exploring. Looking at the forecast before we left on this trip, we saw that rainy weather seems to have settled into this part of Europe, with temperatures in the low teens. Rob and I may not be having the cycling adventures we’d hoped for, but I’ll fill you in when we go “live” with journals again next week. In the meantime, here’s what I prepared for you today.
 
No matter where you are, it seems it’s the time for April Showers, but it’s also definitely phishing season. Having heard of a friend in the US whose business website was held hostage by hackers (and his company had to pay to get it back), and a poorly protected women’s charity that recently lost all of its contacts and the ability to promote an upcoming event here in Victoria, I am shaken when it comes to the prospect of losing touch with you through social media.
 
So, when I got this the other day, my blood ran cold.
 

 
That is, until I got to the porn site part.
 
While I knew this wasn’t me, how many upstanding, church-going, community pillars would flat-out panic at the thought of their after-hours (or even at-work) proclivities being spread out to the world?
 
Then I got one a few days later from no less an organization than the CIA. (Uh-huh.) Again, the focus was on child porn and things I would never, ever associate with, so – having just gotten the “we know what you’ve been looking at” scam just a few days earlier, I was wiser to what was happening. Unlike the first one, it didn’t look like it had been typed up and photo’d or faxed; this one had just the slightest patina of professionalism to it. These people are such slick slime. And for their troubles, they demand 10x the payout: $10,000 US. 
 
I have no doubt that somewhere cowers someone – perhaps a politician, PTA member or a teacher, a student with big hopes or another perfect victim – who is literally shaking and panicking as to how they are going to come up with one or ten thousand dollars to pay for their indiscretion (or crime) to stay silent. It’s a nefarious scheme bent on punishing the target – probably not just once – and as much as I think anyone who has a place in their life for child pornography should indeed be outed and tried, it should be by our criminal law system, not some two-bit crook with a big bitcoin demand and a bigger set of cojones.
 
Be aware. Talk to your children/partner or, if you’d rather not, just send them this journal. While you probably don’t need or want to know if they’re looking on adult sites, make sure they are aware that there’s a phishing expedition going on that’s out to get everyone it possibly can. And it is not legit. Back with you here tomorrow.
 

Welcome to another day of journaling long distance. While Mike and I are hosting our AMA Waterways Tulip Time Cruise, I’ve written a fresh blog here for you. Today we’re in Middelburg, Netherlands and I promise pictures and stories for you from Europe when we return next week, okay? Thanks for understanding.
 
There are a lot of great sayings about not judging a book by its cover (including that one itself) but one of my favourites has to be the one above. And nowhere was that more evident than some recent challenges for Rob that had people coming to entirely the wrong conclusion.
 
It all began several years ago when Rob had an attack of pancreatitis. In that it happened at the end of the Christmas hoidays while we were at our Minden cottage, the staff at our closest hospital figured he’d overindulged in the alcohol department and they weren’t going to give him any kind of pain killers. He suffered – and anyone who has had pancreatitis knows how terribly, awfully painful it is – while it was just assumed that he suffered from alcoholism.
 
Many, many months (and a few attacks later) a doctor in Toronto diagnosed it for the rare condition it was and is: pancreas divisum, a congenital anomaly, and fixed it, thank goodness.
 
Then just last month – not to dwell on poor ol’ Rob, but this is about him, too – he got some cream prescribed by his dermatologist for his previously cancerous nose. This stuff, called Efudex (which can also be injected for different types of cancers), is to be applied to the place of concern for two straight weeks and – to oversimplify here – if there are cancerous cells there, they are prevented from dividing.
 
In the case of his skin, the cream would eventually cause those cells to flake off. But in the weeks before that happened, Rob’s nose, on which he’d had surgery in the past for skin cancer, became terribly discoloured. It turned a very deep red and he was embarrassed to be seen sporting such a rosy, sore-looking schnozz. Of course, cancer is worse than some embarrassment, to be sure, but Rob knew it looked as though he was a full-time drinker. Again with the alcohol, right?
 

 
Now, I take you to the nurse in the clinic where he was having his colonoscopy. After reading about pancreatitis in his chart and looking at Rob’s nose, she admitted that she right away thought “alcoholic.” It was an easy assumption to make and she was grateful to learn, not only about Efudex, but also about this pancreas divisum condition. She’d not heard of it before.
 
We’re glad to be able to enlighten people at every turn. But it also served as a really good reminder to me and everyone else that not everything is as it appears. I remember my friend Lisa was furious when her dad, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, was presumed to be driving drunk. Here’s his story in Lisa’s words:

Dad was driving one evening and he swerved to avoid a deer. (Yes, you’re not supposed to swerve, but he swerved.) He landed in the ditch and his pickup ended up against a fence. The fence jammed his door and he was unable to get out. Instead of helping get him out, the attending police officer questioned him while he was trapped, assuming he was drunk. 
 
My Dad was agitated (for obvious reasons!) and his hands were shaking (Parkinson’s) and he was in his 70s at the time. Instead of having any compassion and assisting my Dad, the cop ignored his pleas and acted like he was on an episode of Law and Order. The thought of my Dad, helpless, feeling unsafe in his vehicle, and no one helping him out, still makes me angry. 

I guess if you were to ask the cop, you’d hear that he sees so many drivers who have been drinking that he just put two and two together and made what would most often be a logical connection.
 
But for the rest of us, it reminds me of the old saying (which I still remember from TV’s The Odd Couple because seeing ASS on the television was something I couldn’t wrap my young head around): “When You Assume, you make an ASS of U and ME.” So true. It’s so easy to add things up and, not only come to the wrong conclusion, but find yourself on the wrong page altogether. Just a thought.
 
Glad you’re on this page, though, and I’ll have a new journal for you here again tomorrow.
 

As you read this, we will have just spent our first night aboard the AMAStella on AMA Waterways. As I mentioned here Friday, Mike Cooper, my husband Rob and I are hosting a group of former listeners and future friends aboard this river boat which travels from Amsterdam down to Antwerp, Belgium and back up to Amsterdam. We fly home on Sunday.
 
Today, according to our itinerary, we’re going to Hoorn, where we stop for a few hours. Later we’re off to Middelburg, Netherlands. Wednesday we arrive in Ghent, Belgium for a day of tours and exploring; Thursday we dock in Antwerp and then Friday we hit up three places in the Netherlands: Rotterdam, Kinderdijk and Schoonhoven. Then we return to Amsterdam and disembark on Sunday.
 
We laughed out loud when Rob figured that, according to Google Maps, when you type in our destinations in order, it calculated that it would take us 8 hours 26 minutes to drive! That’s how close everything in Europe is, when you think about it.
 

 
I mean, back in 2004 when I was “between jobs,” we made it a point to see as much of Europe as we could as a little family. Rob, Lauren and I booked two bus trips back-to-back and managed to see 16 countries in a month. (I tell a few stories from that time in Mourning Has Broken.) We’ve counted our blessings repeatedly for having had the finances and the time to take that July trip.
 
Lauren was able to give the subjects she studied in school so much context (she was 13 when we went) while we all got to make memories together in close proximity. How we loved that time with her! While Lauren was weary of cathedrals, churches and museums by the time the trip was over, she’d also witnessed Bastille Day fireworks in Paris and made all kinds of wonderful memories. In fact, she returned to England and Amsterdam on her honeymoon in 2013.
 
Because I’m not entirely sure about WiFi on the boat (although I’m told it’s just great) and time zones are bound to mess me up in terms of posting correctly, I’ve got a week’s worth of fresh journals that are ready to go in the coming days. When we return to Canada next week (actually we fly in on Sunday afternoon), I’ll have pictures and stories for you here – not enough so you’re resentful you didn’t come, but just enough so you’ll feel like you’ve been travelling with us, or might want to do this if we plan a trip together in the future. How does that sound?
 
Take good care and we’ll be back with you here tomorrow with the story of something pretty awful that showed up on Rob…and the lesson that you can never judge a book by its cover – or a man by his nose.
 

Welcome to Friday. Once again our suitcases are open and laid out on a guest room bed; Molly senses something’s up, but we have a house sitter who will be with her from the time we leave tomorrow morning until we get back next Sunday afternoon. As you probably know, Rob and I are joining Mike Cooper for a river cruise with AMA Waterways.
 
It’s called Tulip Time and we’ll be helping to host a 7-night cruise to and from Amsterdam. I’ll have snippets of the itinerary in next week’s journals, but we’re happy to be sharing this time with some 51 former CHFI listeners and journal visitors (and even a few like Mary Larin and Bill & Andrea Bates, who won trips with us back in the day) as we take a scenic cruise through, as the brochure puts it, “Amsterdam’s legendary canals, past elegant narrow buildings and the house where Anne Frank once lived in hiding.”
 
Rob and I had been looking forward to taking the daily cycling excursions (the boat, the AMAStella has its own – and helmets, of course) but the weather’s looking rainy and chilly. However, we’ll make the most of it, wandering the serpentine cobblestone streets of medieval cities like Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges.
 
One of the things to which we most look forward is spending time with our sweet friend Mike Cooper. For a time, when Debbie’s long and valiant fight with cancer was coming to its sad and long-foreseen conclusion, he let us know he just couldn’t see coming along. He was unable to envision a future of doing anything, never mind travelling, without his life’s companion. And yet, here he is. We never gave up hope and, once again, he found his.
 
Mike’s taking part in this river cruise as much for himself and his own spirits as he is for all of us. And I know it’s going to be a good week all around. That’s what friends do for each other; we are there to hold each other when we can’t catch a breath from laughing so completely, or crying so hard.
 
In many ways, you’ve been like that for me here and it’s for that reason that I have a confession to make: I have had to clear out some emails. Actually, a lot of emails.
 
Two weeks ago, Rob and I switched out this computer:
 

 
….for a new one.
 

 
As much as I owed my old one for all it had seen me through over the past several years, I was tired of seeing the rainbow-wheel-of-doom spinning endlessly when I was trying to save or send. We recently both upgraded our computers and, after the migration, I came across literally thousands of messages from the past two or three years, marked as unread. I know for sure there was none that had not been read and I really need to tell you that. But, I’m sorry to say, there are a few hundred where I’m not sure if I responded.
 
Many came in when I announced in November 2016 that I was retiring. More came in the following month when I left Toronto. When Debbie Cooper passed away last October, there was another thick and wide blanket of warm wishes to envelop us, but with travel and the work obligations that followed Deb’s funeral, I simply did not answer all of them; I just wasn’t able to do it in a timely manner. But your support and kindness were appreciated.
 
So here it is: please forgive me if you’re still hoping for an answer to any emails. It’s likely that if you sent something prior to 2019, you will not get a response, and that pains me. But I have to do something to get my head above water. (Perhaps heading out on a river cruise I could use a different term…but anyway….)
 
I have come up with a system of colour coding emails so that people who are writing with their stories of bereavement are first to be answered. That said, there are some souls who wrote to me at the end of February to whom I have not yet written back. It’s not that I don’t know what to say, but I want to take the time to say it right.
 
For everyone else, yes, your emails matter to me as much now as they always have. I do apologize if there are long periods between your writing and my response. As we head out tomorrow to fly from Victoria to Vancouver to Amsterdam, I will be spending less time answering emails than usual. So I’ll beg your understanding and, again, forgiveness if I don’t answer. Know that I have read your note…I always do.
 
Next week: all new journals. Feel free always to comment on my FB page and have a fantastic weekend. And thank you!