If I had it to do over again …

Have you ever wondered what you’d do for a living if you hadn’t followed the career path you did?  It’s not something I’ve ever really dwelled on.  Probably because from the time I was a kid in school I wanted to work in advertising.  Which I did, successfully.

Worked for some of the best and biggest agencies in the world, on the bluest of blue chip brands.  Learned from and worked with and for some of the brightest, most talented folks out there; and I’ve won more than my fair share of awards over the years, as if the thrill of doing the work wasn’t enough.

So why wonder what else I might have done.

Except sometimes I do.  Not that I have any regrets, so don’t start going down that road, ya

Day 273. All Done

That’s it for another year. Marilyn and I saw our final documentary at 8:00 last night. HotDocs 2013 is officially over. Funny, but in the end, I was no longer tired. I know I wrote, early in the week, I was weary; and grateful for a couple of days without movies. But I got my mojo back towards the end of the week. I hit my stride. And, now, I’m re-energized.

The movies we saw got much better as the week progressed (until yesterday), which could have something to do with it. Or, I just got into the groove. Doesn’t matter what it was, in the grand scheme of things. I’m just happy we went. And I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing some of the films we missed, during the year.

Here in Toronto we’re very fortunate. We have a theatre, very close to where I live, devoted to showing only documentary films, 365 days a year. We also get non-documentary festival-worthy films at other theatres

Day 244. Nice Day

When I went to bed on Friday night, I had all kinds of plans for Saturday.  I’d heard it was going to be warm, almost 60 degrees warm.  It’s been a long time since we had temperatures so balmy here, in Toronto.  So I had every intention of spending as much of the day as possible, outdoors.

I stayed up too late, though.  It was well after 1:00 a.m. when I finally got into bed.  So I was a bit wrecked when I got up.  I blogged, fed the cats and found myself back in bed, where I promptly fell back asleep.  I’m embarrassed to tell you what time I woke up.

Let’s just say I must have been really tired.

Not quite ready to venture out of bed, I started reading blogs.  One or two in, I found myself at Word by Word, one of my favourites.  I loved the day Claire was writing about.  Although it was raining in Provence, where she lives, she was going to an English book sale.

She talked about how, even though she doesn’t need any more books, it wasn’t stopping her.  I can relate.  I don’t need any more books, either.  I have stacks of them I haven’t gotten around to reading yet.  But I keep buying them.  I just can’t

Day 18. Start Packing

There’s a WordPress blog that I’ve recently started to follow — Bucket List Publications.  The author of the blog creates a new bucket list every year; and the other day she shared this year’s list of 100 things she wants to do.  Yes, 100!  She has completed some, but still.  I was exhausted just reading it.  That’s what I call ambitious.  Anyway, she invited readers to share their lists, as well.

Her list intimidated me at first.  I thought, God, where do I even start?   Then my phone rang, and that was it for a while.  Then, without being aware I’d even been thinking about it, a couple of hours later a list popped into my head.  I won’t bore you with all of it, but I will say that out of 10 things I’d like to do, 5 were travel-related.  Even more interesting, at least to me, is the fact that out of those 5, I’ve been hankering after 4 of them for quite some time.

So I guess it’s time to stop procrastinating, and get on with it.

The one I hadn’t thought about doing before I read Lesley’s blog is learning to speak Italian while living in Italy.  Over the years I have wanted to learn to speak Italian, but I never considered doing it by living among the people — which one could do even for three or four