I've been a little busy...
So a quick post to catch up..... Last Wednesday I flew home from Toronto to San Jose, Costa Rica. When I got home there was a dead scorpion in my lounge, luckily I haven't found a live one while putting on my trousers. I had a quiet night in Santa Ana and checked out a couple of bars I've been meaning to go to.

Thursday I went to the Teatro Torres, dropped off all The Body Shop products that the cast had requested and followed it up with drinks in a salsa bar in Heredia. People just seem to bring their own instruments and jam, it's too packed to dance really, which saves much embarassment.

Friday night saw drinks and great conversation in a bar near work, then on Saturday after three hours sleep, I got up, took a taxi to the airport and flew to Managua, Nicaragua via El Salvador and spent a fantastic weekend in Granada (the Nicaraguan one) and Managua. Granada is an unspoilt colonial wonder and I stayed in a hotel built in a restored mansion house and was only awoken once by the sound of gunfire and sirens. I found a new friend and the time spent there was sublime. Sunday lunch was taken in a restaurant on the shore of a lagoon that fills the crater of an inactive Volcano.

I was shocked by the brief glimpses of poverty in Nicaragua. I have resolved to visit a lot more of Central and South America. I'll take that trip to Panama in three weeks time, then see if I can work my way through the continent a weekend at a time. Companies with a North American ethos don't seem to understand the whole vacation concept. Work life balance indeed, how is five or six days work then one or occasionally two days off a balance?

This morning I flew back to San Jose in a twin turboprop ATR 42 and after a rough landing, took a taxi to work. Tonight, I had dinner with my friend Nicky which was long overdue and we chatted about everything and nothing. About an hour ago I jumped in a cab home.

I am looking forward to spending more time in this end of the continent.

Chinese horoscopes
A recent radio programme prompted me to check out my chinese horoscope. Apparently I am a fire horse, which unfortunately gives away my age. So now I'm going to have to update my lunar sign so that it is in tune with my date of birth which I switched to 1972 a little while ago. It is not a failure to own up to the years I've spent here, it is more a realignment of my chronological age with my youthful good looks!

So the stories go, fire horses are often killed at birth due to the shame and trouble that they will bring their families. I know that both my parents contemplated this on numerous occasions when I was a small boy, when they caught me painting their eiderdown to match their brass bed, when I was kicking the lower cans from the pyramids at the local supermarket (Newtonian Law needed verification) and any one of the many of my youthful crimes. I never really practiced arson and gave up the violin and wasn't a nerdy boy with dreams of world domination, which accounts for my failure to achieve the giddy heights of Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Bill Gates.

I don't believe in the whole horoscope thing as I don't see that 1/12 of the worlds population will have a similar day tomorrow nor that everyone born on March 19th will have a great Monday next week because the paranormal hack in the paper says it will be great for Pisces. Chinese horoscopes have a little higher granularity, it taking 60 years for one cycle of the combined element and animal signs, still tosh though I'm sure. I was so fed up with people telling me what virgos were like that I changed my star sign to Chevrolet. Apparently I am a typical virgo, you know intelligent, good looking, virile so I might change back. Anyway, for the purposes of the next paragraph I am going to suspend disbelief.

My predictions for 2006 are:

• My project will go live with much fanfare, anxiety and raised voices in March
• A minority Conservative government will be elected in Canada next week
• They'll realise it was a mistake in 2007
• I will meet a wonderful woman and fall in love
• Someone you know will listen to an ELO number
• General motors fresh new strategy will be to put a marginally larger engine in the same crappy cars.
• Eric Clapton and Joe Cocker will each release a new compilation album of hits they had years ago in much the same way as they do every year.
• The American public will realise that Laura Bush is actually more of an idiot than her husband, he was born simple and can't help it, she married into idiocy or was it money?
• I will fritter away a lot of cash on rubbish I don't need.

On another note I am leaving Toronto on Wednesday to go home to Costa Rica for a week. Then after I get back here I have some flights booked for a weekend in New York City (fortuitously during the Chinese New Year celebrations) and some time next month I really need to go to Panama.

This weekend has been far too short!

Whaling
I was very disturbed when the other day I heard a Norwegian official defending whaling on the grounds of it being a tradition and ecological ocean management. When in fact it is merely the barbaric torture and slaughter of an intelligent creature that we know so little about for commercial reasons. I could buy the tradition argument in Iceland or Norway's case if they went out in rowing boats and hand threw harpoons at any that they happened to see while not grafting at the oars. Other than a few coastal villages, the Japanese have only been eating whale since the Second World War, so there is no cultural excuse.

There's nothing traditional or humane about chasing down whales using sonar in diesel powered death cruisers and firing a harpoon tipped with a hand grenade then hauling it back to ship, shooting at it with rifles and hanging it upside down with blowhole subsurface so it drowns to death before craning it into a factory ship for processing into Minke burgers for the rich consumers of this food. There is no humane way to slaughter an animal this size. It should be stopped.

Japan and Norway are expected to slaughter around 2000 whales this year, for "Scientific Research" as there has been an IWC moratorium on commercial whaling since 1985/6. Although exactly why you need to kill 2000 whales a year for research and how putting the meat on supermarket shelves constitutes scientific research is a bloody mystery. Every year many whales become stranded in shallow waters for reasons we do not understand, if scientific research is necessary, these could be used. If you wanted to study what is man would it be easier to do with 2000 corpses ? This wednesday Greenpeace Germany parked the 20 tonne carcass of a fin whale that had become stranded on the Baltic coast and died, outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin to demonstrate this point.

Every year, the Japanese bribe poor nations with no interest in whaling to join the IWC in order to help them tip the balance at the next vote in the hope that they can gain some quasi-official sanction for their continuance and increase of this dirty trade.



A Japanese whaling ship rammed the Greenpeace vessel harrying them in the southern ocean earlier this month, if you can afford to do something to help them or are just interested, go here.

Bastards!

Meanwhile, today in London, a 7 tonne bottlenose whale has found itself swimming up the Thames past The Houses of Parliament and everyone concerned is trying to gently persuade it to swim back out to sea. Now isn't that a better approach?

First real motorcycle, first real friend...
Motorcycles have been a part of my life for more than 20 years. I first road a a motorised two wheel vehicle on the road when I was fifteen. My dad had a little 50cc Honda and late at night I grabbed the keys and snuck out on it. I was a rainy night, so I had what I now call a "get-off" which is when friction fails you and your bike dumps you on the road. Youthful zeal and inexperience were my downfall here. That and my dad the next day when he noticed the scratches. Although I very briefly had a little moped myself at 16 my first bike was 1981 Honda CB125T I bought when I was 17. It was beautiful and I rode everywhere on it.

I had just started my apprenticeship at a diesel generator manufacturer in Havant near Portsmouth and needed my own transport to get there. I wasn't interested in cars. My grandfather loaned me the 300 pound sterling it cost to buy and he wouldn't take the payments. He just asked me to give up smoking, I didn't, but he still wouldn't take the cash.

He was eighty something years old and visiting my mother at her house when I turned up on the bike he hadn't seen yet. He had ridden motorcycles all his life but had stopped riding his last a couple of years earlier. He missed them. He wanted to have a look at the bike I'd been lusting for and left the house to see it. After a few seconds a broad grin and a devious look overtook him. "Let's have a go then!" proffering his hand for the keys. My mum came running out the house, but by then it was too late, he was off. "What are you doing Jake?, he's eighty years old, he's not wearing a crash helmet !" Mum was having kittens. My reply was drowned out by the howl of the engine and we watched as the grinning red blurr blasted past. After about ten minutes he'd run out of road laws to break and returned probably the happiest I'd ever seen him.

A rear footpeg fell off it one day and I only noticed when I got home. There was an old CB125T parked around the corner from where my mum lived. A matt silver one with rusty spoked wheels that always seemed to have a plastic bag over the cylinders. I often wondered what the bag was for. One afternoon there was a lad working on the bike and I rode over to ask about it. He had a northern accent, which I now recognise to be from Lancashire. We introduced ourselves and he informed me that the sparkplug threads had been helicoiled but it had been done poorly and when it rained water got into the cylinders. I took this to be a tall story, it all seeming faintly ridiculous and I jestingly asked him if I could have a rear footpeg off of his bike to replace the one I had lost. Much to my surprise he agreed and handed me a wrench to take it off. His footpeg in hand I figured I owed him a few pints of beer to return the favour. The young lad has been for many years, possibly since that day, the closest of friends and the brother I didn't have growing up. I have now known Dave, more years than I have not known him and he is one of the rocks in my life, picked me up when I've fallen down more times than I choose to count. Perhaps one day I'll let you know about some of the glory days we had, before realising that we were mortal, which Dave only discovered about a few months ago when his son and my nephew Thomas was born.

I used to race everywhere, not a roundabout that didn't see sparks flying off the footpegs and hardly a month that there weren't blue lights reigning in my exuberance. I was racking up a thousand miles per month after work and setting the points with an impact driver to stop them vibrating out at the fourteen thousand RPM redline. Every road was a racetrack, every other bike, a challenge and if it would cut seconds off the course and see me in front of a bigger bike that had got the better of me, I'd dash the wrong way across a roundabout. I think I survived because I was the Wile E Coyote that never looked down. He could run off a cliff and all the time he didn't look down, he didn't fall. I've looked down since.

The little red Honda died after a year due to the heavy mileage and a car shunt. I borrowed a bike to take my test on. I sometimes think fondly of my CB125T and how much fun I used to have and it's long enough ago now for me to think fondly of that young tear-away I used to be.

Harry Pothead

I can't stand this effeminate, smug mummy's boy! I'd like to see him try it on with Artemis Fowl!

Ahh..... the Nimbus 2000 broomstick, how many have watched the movie and wished they too could own one and now a toy that mum can enjoy too. Only another few sequels and Hermione Granger will be on one of these babies.....

Fortunately they are still available on ebay for the eighteen to fifty eight year old lady that has everything.

Work, work, work.....
Well the project I'm running is approaching the deadline. Two months from today it will be live or we will have failed, the deadline can't be moved for business reasons. So the whole team are busting their butts.

I wanted to pick something up from the Hudson Bay Company in North York and a colleague, Rodrigo from Costa Rica who is also working in Toronto and I strolled in. There weren't any customers, but it is a very cold day with a nasty wind blowing so I figured they must all be at home. There weren't any people at the checkouts, curiouser and curiouser. We seemed to be the only people there. But the flat screens were showing commercials for this and that, and the escalators were running, so we hopped on the escalator. My Costa Rican buddy remarked "Mae, this is crazy, these Canadians are so trusting, in Costa Rica this shop would have been cleaned out by now." There were no checkout assistants upstairs either, Rodrigo repeatedly enquired "Hello?" in a loud voice, but there was no answer. I said "Rod, I think it might be closed, all the lights at the end of the room are off." We went downstairs. Still no-one, I walked to the end of the store that adjoins the mall and has floor to ceiling reinforced glass doors that are open and rolled into the wall during opening hours. "Rod, the shop is closed, let's leave." We walked back out the entrance we had come in and I looked at the opening hours on a sign, Saturday they close at 6:00pm, I looked at my watch which read 6:30pm. There was a police car near the entrance we had gone in, I walked over to it, but there was no policeman inside. My natural paranoia cut in and I immediately assumed that CCTV had picked up two handsome, rugged, beasts of men (Rodrigo and myself) strolling around a locked shop and the cops had come to investigate. We got in the car and I drove to one side of the mall looking for someone in a uniform to talk to but no luck. I drove to the other entrance of the store and as I passed the unlocked entrance, a large white van with two ugly and hairy characters inside that had slowed sped off. At the other entrance the last of the store workers were leaving, so I went up to a man who seemed to be in charge and told him about the unlocked doors. He said they had been locked earlier and someone must have unlocked them, then he ran off to sort things out.

We drove away, joking that about all the unguarded plasma screens and how my boss probably wouldn't cover bail money on expenses anyway with the final thought that just perhaps we had spoiled the shopping trip for the two ugly guys in the white van. Seeing two young(ish) guys with cropped hair in a new Buick Allure (called a Lacrosse in the US) and thinking to themselves, "No regular guy under 50 buys a Buick, they must be cops!"

As I write this, I'm sipping at a cup of ginseng tea sweetened with maple syrup. Very healthy! It's amazing the rubbish you'll drink when there's no whisky in the house!

Shock Motoring News: General Motors make crap cars no-one wants to buy!
A long, long time ago in a place far, far away.......*
The first car I owned was a 1971 Chevrolet Impala. It was a two door, in a lime green that was matt after years of polishing by previous owners. I loved it so much I made a recording of the engine rumble and mailed it back to friends in the UK. I had bought it for a girlfriend, I was only interested in motorcycles but I worked night shift, she worked day shift and taking her to and from work on my Honda was only leaving me 3 hours sleep in the afternoon. To cut a long story short, she left me and the car for a job in San Francisco (mad I know), so I took my Californian driving test and my first steps into the land of 4 wheels. It was handy really, a short time later a woman driving a pick-up without paying attention and without paying her insurance, pulled out in front of me. My femur shattered and I watched my right thigh form a ninety degree bend about halfway between my hip and my knee as I flew over the hood of her truck and tumbled into the on-coming traffic lane. My bike didn't survive the accident so for the first time a car replaced a motorcycle as my primary mode of transport, although they haven't always been that way since.

The North American motor industry, at one time the engine of the US economy is in meltdown. General Motors have announced huge redundancy plans and the closure of plants in response to a profits warning that has seen the share price fall to the lowest point in 20 years. My job as most of you know sees me splitting my time between Costa Rica and Canada. While up here in the North I rent whatever bloatmobile is available from Budget. So far the score is 3-1 to abject failure with the only goal for interest being a Chrysler 300C. My current ride is a Buick Allure. To drive it is much like sitting on a blancmange strapped to a supermarket trolley with one wheel missing. The interior is an ocean of cheap, hard, grey, plastic with plastic wood veneer printed highlights. The first L in ALLURE of the chromed plastic lettering stuck on the trunk so that passers by know what car not to buy next, has fallen off as the 2c piece of sticky tape gave up trying to hold on to it. So I am now driving A LURE, a lure for what is in question. Chevrolet engineers appear to have dispensed with damping in the suspension design and one could almost get seasick driving it. Unsurprisingly the new GM cars are being sold at 10-20% below the sticker price, with the Impala being an inexplicable exception. A leaf through their 'exciting new models' reveals all that needs to be said.


A few years ago, the US motor companies demanded that if the Japanese wanted access to US markets then they ought to build their cars their. The result: Honda Civic Motortrend 2006 Car of the Year, Honda Ridgeline Motortrend 2006 Truck of the Year, Nissan XTerra Motortrend 2006 SUV of the Year and nowadays these are North American cars built with North American labour, so no-one can say that buying a Honda is costing American jobs.

The only cars that the US car manufacturers seem to do well are muscle cars, the Dodge Charger and Ford Mustang being prime examples and trucks, Chevy are behind the others here as well. So if the US motor industry wants to start making cars people want to buy it should. Sort out build quality, realise that if BMW can make a serious car with a 3L diesel engine, then a 4L, 5L or 6L petrol engine isn't necessary, spend more than $10 on the interior, learn about suspension, you shouldn't have to spend $70K to get a car that doesn't roll like a rowing boat in a Tsunami, learn that biggest isn't always best.

European cars are for the most part too expensive for the North American market, but the Japanese have cracked it, the Koreans are doing well and the first Chinese cars should be hitting the US in a few months. It seems a shame that after all these years, the US motor industry is going to die, killed off by the consumers' understandable desire for quality and value when all it would take is a little common sense.

Jase recommendations for US marque car purchase:

• Family man or pimp - Chrysler 300C
• Exceedingly rich car nut - Ford GT
• Rap star or drug dealer - Hummer H2 (what else)
• Survivalist - Hummer H1
• Self obsessed body builder, worried about hair loss or genitalia - Dodge Viper
• Recently divorced 40s (Man) - Dodge Charger or Ford Mustang
• Recently divorced 40s (Man or Woman) - Ford Thunderbird
• Hairdresser - Chrysler PT Cruiser
• Hairdresser with family or blind person - Chevy HHR
• Teenager with acne and rich dad - Chevy SSR
• Construction worker - Ford F150 or Dodge RAM
• Overweight, fat or obese - bicycle

*Historical note: I moved to San Diego from London when I was 20 years old and returned to London some 3 years later.

A reflective day
Yesterday I took a stroll downtown with a colleague from Costa Rica. After a curry on Queen Street and a coffee downtown we walked up Yonge Street and outside a branch of Footlocker was a pile of cuddly toys, letters of condolence and candles. I asked a bystander what had happened and was told of the shooting of Jane Creba on Boxing Day. A fifteen year old girl that was out shopping with her sister and caught in the crossfire of two young gang members exacting the defence of their delicate and juvenile egos with guns on a crowded city street. Six others were injured and her brief, bright, light was extinguished outside a shoe shop, the day after Xmas. Being outside the country for twelve days, I hadn't heard.

I'm going to get controversial here: I look forward to the day that registered drug users can walk into Shoppers Drug Mart and pick up their cocaine or heroine or anything else prescription for a nominal sum made on a corporate farm, refined in a corporate factory; So they won't have to buy their vice from villains, with money stolen from innocent people; So there will be no villains defending territory for the sale of their detergent cut white powders; So there will be no drug wars and no wars on drugs; So that the users only suffer from their using and they are the only people that suffer, unlike today when the cold dead corpse of a fifteen year old girl, lies in the cold wet ground. The only time her smile will be seen again, is in the tearful mind's eye of the people that knew her. And for what........?



We got a cab to a place a little further up Yonge and were pleasantly surprised to find ourselved in the middle of an Irish folk music night. The pub was packed with people of all ages, the musicians had talent and the beer flowed. Normaly they also have two or three real ales (from a hand pump) on tap as well, which is enough to put any pub outside England on my map. The music was full of energy, as were the girls dancing on boards strewn on the floor, heals and toes clattering an ad hoc Riverdance. The atmosphere was about as good as I've ever experienced in a pub anywhere. I met and chatted with a few friendly people and have decided to make it a regular haunt. There was a girl laughing and joking in the corner of the room with a group of her friends, she appeared to be a Thalidomide victim, although there aren't many left now, so maybe it was something else. I remember them from when I was a small boy, sitting on a bus with my mum and feeling both sad and for some reason embarrassed, perhaps almost guilty. The girl had a big pretty smile, slim, shapely legs and long hair. Her left arm tapered out where her elbow should be, without a hand, her right, the same length but with a wrist, thumb and forefinger. She drank her pint through her straw, clasping the glass between forefinger and thumb. She laughed and joked and chatted away with her pals without a care in the world. I went outside for a breath of fresh air. And a cigarette. When I came back in, the whole pub was holding hands and swaying to some frollicksome Irish air. The girl with the big smile and the big physical compromises, saw me, saw that I couldn't get past and wasn't involved, then pulled me into the human chain. She introduced herself, grabbed me with her hand and I swayed and jigged along in time with the rest of them. What a marvelous tribute to the very best of human spirit she is.

I had a nightcap in my local. I was the only customer, I didn't know the barmaid, but we got talking. She is from the Ukraine, a pretty, charming and enigmatic woman, in her early twenties and busy studying for her degree. Her family brought her to Canada because she had contracted bone cancer due to Chernobyl and escaping the radiation was an imperitive. We laughed and talked and I walked home a little while later, a little more reflective, a little happier and a little humbler for my day out.

Maybe Sunday was trying to tell me something.

A quiet and wild Xmas in Costa Rica. (Part 2)
I went to the theatre with a few friends as another pal Natalia was in it. I haven't enjoyed a show so much in years, more cabaret than anything else and a marvelous melange of comedic skits and dance. The Torres theatre, named after Maria Torres the star of the show by her friend Johanna the owner of the venue, is an intimate place with a small and cozy bar open to the street in downtown San Jose. After the show, we had dinner with the cast. I managed for the first time not to upset the creative and completely gorgeous Natalia, the booze flowed freely and Maria Torres insisted we hugged for a photo in the restaurant. I put my arm around her for the shot and she insisted I clasp her (covered) boobs for the camera. Although boob clasping is not something I am averse to, I am not accustomed to being instructed on the clasping technique for a new and famous pair for the sake of the camera. But that's theatre I suppose. There was much laughter and new friendships were formed. I went to bed late and happy with a smile and some memories for my collection.



Christmas Eve was quiet, a few drinks with a colleague in the evening and a lay in for Christmas day. The Spanish give gifts on January 6th, Epiphany or Kings' Day as the story goes that this is the day that the three kings delivered the presents to baby Jesus, which is why there are twelve days to this holiday. It is only a theory, but it is probable that the three kings were from Costa Rica. On arrival at the stable: "Que mae! Sorry, we're late with the presents, but there was a party you know, otherwise we'd have got here for Christmas." In Costa Rica they celebrate Christmas on the 25th as people do in North America and the UK.

After coffee, I opened the present from my mum, that she gave me in October with the strict instruction, not to open before Christmas. In the afternoon I went over to a friend Matt's for dinner. Matt had 40lb of turkey in the oven and his small pet dog was looking eager and ambitious. I normally end up cooking at these affairs and missing most of the party itself. Matt, very kindly told me to stay out of the kitchen, which I did, except for whipping up a quick white brandy sauce and brandy butter for the Christmas pudding.

The rest of the week in Costa Rica was quiet other than a mixed New Year's Eve. I worked every day. The Sunday before leaving I popped in to Rancho Macho for a beer with a book. I ended up chatting until midnight about cabbages and kings to Monica, a very interesting Uruguayan lady living in the US and vacationing in San Jose with her lovely daughter Kaisa, who was being very brave about a horse riding accident she had had earlier in the day.



Now that the Christmas season is over, alcohol consumption must return to sensible levels, there is a lot to do at work and hangovers don't help. Harold Wilson British Priminister in the 1970's once recounted that his Foreign Secretary George Brown, was brilliant, until four in the afternoon. Once at an embassy reception in Peru, he had asked someone to dance, the recipient of the invitation replied: " You are drunk. That is not the cha cha, that is the Peruvian national anthem and I am not a delectable young thing in red, I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima."

A quiet and wild Xmas in Costa Rica. (Part 1)
I'll now commence to cover my recent time on the rich coast, as I said I would in my previous post. I got back to Costa Rica on the Wednesday before Xmas. Arriving at my apartment I set down my bags and the gatekeeper gave me the now spare set of keys to the place. Chocolate dust seemed to be embedded in every pore of my dwelling as my ex-bruja had decided to use it as her kitchen prior to swanning off on the rollercoaster of her own ego.

I called my pal Nicky and was told of a mission to the cinema that evening to see King Kong. This movie would be better entitled "Running with Dinosaurs" and the near perfection of special effects cannot mask the fact that it amounts to not much more than three hours of rancid cheese and directorial self-indulgence. The 187 minutes of catatonia that is this digital cellulose coma was capped in the last moments by Jack Black who managed to utter "It was beauty that killed the beast!" for any amoeba watching that might not have been able to work it out for themselves. Peter Jackson should have saved the countless millions in production costs by filming the whole thing on a camcorder with handpuppets using the cash he saved to pay Anthony Hopkins and Renee Zellweger for the voice-overs. It would have been just as believable.

The trip to the cinema was an event in itself. While stopped at a light in a taxi on my way to the cinema a car pulled up alongside, driving was a buddy of mine, Esteban whom I work with in Canada and had left the office two days before me. It's a small country! It's a pity that the taxi driver didn't follow Esteban, as he shot across a roundabout and then drove down the on ramp to a freeway the wrong way. Realising what he had done, he smiled, carried on driving and told me that we would cross over a space in the centre reservation when there was one. He had a change of heart and a change of pants when the headlights of another vehicle came hurtling towards us from the blind bend we were approaching. Luckily, the taxista was just as without regard for speed restraint in reverse as he was in forward motion. It was almost with relief that he swerved backwards out on to the busy roundabout we had been on only a couple of minutes previously.

Stay tuned for the next less than exciting episode of my life.

Happy New Year
It's been a quiet and wild few days, but I'll save telling you for when I'm back in Toronto, hiding from the cold in my apartment. It's New Year's Eve, my friends and family across the ocean will soon be putting head to pillow, if they haven't already. Faces and thoughts are flashing through my mind and I am missing home. I am not sure where home is. Where the heart is? Mine is spread out so far, I no longer know. To an inveterate nest builder, such as myself, this is particularly galling. I am ever hopeful, but sometimes I think that this has been my undoing. My greatest fear at this very moment is that my sentiments will be the same another year on and I will be another year older.

Sometimes I smile and think of the lyrics to A Wanderin' Star, reflecting that rather than a curse, if that is what life has in store for me, then I should get to enjoy it. But I have felt the need to settle down for many years and not managed it successfully yet and explore too, but exploring is less fun on your own, although I have learnt to enjoy it.

However, the night is young and I can fake it! At least for a little while! So I'm going to shower, get my glad rags on, go out and be gorgeous. Apparently I look even better after a few drinks.
So, ever the optimist and fully able to ply myself with enough compliments that a half-cut me will believe me. I'm going go out and see if I can find someone to share my self delusion.

I would like to wish, you all, my family, friends, colleagues, associates and strangers a very Happy New Year. I hope with all my heart it brings you, peace, health, prosperity and serenity.

Jase