I Have a Dream

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day. If I had a dream, it would be for a Ritz Carlton chef to cook me a delicious lamb dinner, when all I had to do was chat to him as he was cooking and to keep pouring the red wine... and so it was, and it was good. Well done, Dave. Is that shallow? That's a rhetorical question...

But come now, you all know I'm a bleeding heart liberal and that actually I will have whole heartedly embraced this day, fresh from my Iraq war dead memorial visit on Santa Monica beach the morning before. It was also the day of the Golden Globes. I escaped LA and headed for the mountains and Jill's house.

It has been a leisurely 10 days in LALA land, catching up with Jill and Dave, doing a bit of yoga. I started back at the clinic and everyone said how well I looked. I restrained myself from gloating and stating the obvious... I have been on holiday for over 5 months. It has been really good to meet up with people again and there's still a few more people to see. At the clinic Arron and I swapped stories and laughed until the back of our ears hurt - weird. I also met up with someone at a meeting that I had been emailing while I've been away - the emails began when I asked his advice about an acupuncture related question, and we just carried on writing. Now that was a VERY strange experience: to not definitely recognise someone you are sitting opposite in a small room when you actually feel like you know them rather well from 2 months of email contact!

It's fairly cool here at the moment and there have been some bracing winds, but the sky is blue today and the sun in shining eventhough it's weak. I have two nice roomates, Katherine (French Canadian) and Penka (German) and we sit and drink wine, chatting on the balcony and looking out over the Pacific Ocean. We have decided to spend a little more money and stay somewhere a bit more private, so from Thursday Katherine and I will be renting an apartment right next to the beach for my last month here.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King Jr.