Winter Solstice Greetings

Don’t you just love camellias? They are among my favorite flowers, even though my list of favorites is quite long. The best part is that they bloom in winter, bringing us a touch of color and a reminder that spring will come after all.

We are just welcoming the winter solstice and these will be the shortest days/longest nights of the year here in the Northern hemisphere. Christmas is just a couple of days away and soon we will say goodbye to this year and celebrate a new beginning.

Once more this year I will find myself moving with the new year, and I mean the weekend right after January 1. The puppies and I will begin our nomadic life, something I intended to start last spring, but somehow got sidetracked, and we are still here.
We will not go far to begin with, as I still have commitments here in Marin and San Francisco that will take a few more months to wrap up. We will be heading just a little further north, in a lovely tiny cottage in the midst of vineyards just outside Napa, Ca. The plan is to be there till the end of March or possibly April. After that, who knows!

I will be keeping you updated as I go, but for now I would like to say that, because of all the logistics on my to-do list, this may be the last blog post until the new year. I have so much material I yearn to share with you, but I literally do not have the time to edit the images, do the write ups, and all that goes into a well prepared blog post.

I am also in need of doing some behind-the-scenes maintenance work, like back-ups and double back-ups, with new EHDs (external hard drives), and Cloud systems, learning new software, and generally updating my know-how. You know, all that fun (not!) stuff that is necessary to keep the workflow functioning well.

There are piles of this and piles of that around my room that need sorting and packing, and I have not even begun looking at my storage units. The plan is to sell/give away most of my stuff, so I can start my journeying lightened up, or possibly more enlightened, or both. After all, I have only really missed a few things during all these months. I will keep the things I missed, and the ones I have to keep (like paperwork) and let the rest go.

I would much rather work on the blog than any of what I mentioned above, but sometimes those have-tos are the kind that no one else can do for you. Who knows, though, I might still be caught by an irresistible urge to blog, in which case you might see me once more before the end of the year. The intention, though, is truly to stay focused on those have-tos. In any case, I will still be here, behind the scenes, if you need or wish to contact me, and I will try to be on social media as much as I can.

As a see-you-soon gift, I thought I would create a new wallpaper for your computer screen. Of course, I used one of these beautiful camellia images I photographed at my parents’ home in Italy a few years ago. After I created the wallpaper, I was inspired to use more of the images in this post. I hope you have enjoyed them, and I hope you love camellias as much as I do.

Wishing you the best for the Holidays, whichever is your celebratory tradition, and wishing you a new year that will see the realization of your deepest wishes and loftiest dreams. A hui hou (see you again soon) from me, for now, and wiggles from my Boyz.

Click here to download the free wallpaper.