Give Books for Christmas Gifts.

Yes, buy books for Christmas gifts. Not just my books, any books. Children love books, whether you read to them or they read themselves. Do your family members read? — I mean your grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, brother, sisters. Find out what they like to read and buy a book for them. My books seemed to be liked by people interested stories about life in Newfoundland. I think my audience is mainly Newfoundlanders who are over age 40.

Here’s an idea. I have written two series; three books in each — The Beothuk Series and the Newfoundland Series. You can buy both series as bundles at a discount rate from my website and you can add the Coupon Code to get another 15% off. (if you don’t already have one you can get the coupon code by registering to receive notices about my blogs and other notifications — go to my website and scroll down a little and you’ll see where you can sign-up. Go to  www.felsenmeerword.ca )  Anyway these bundles (or the individual books) would make excellent Christmas gifts.

But enough shameless self promotion of my books.

Glenda and I (Glenda is my wife of 44 years for those who don’t know) travel a fair bit.  We’re retired so we have time. I still do clinical work several days a week, but we don’t let anything interfere with our travels. We are going to Goderich, Ontario this Christmas to spent the holidays with our son and his family. Travelling up December 21 and back December 28. But who knows what will happen this time of year. Getting out of Newfoundland can be tricky with our bad weather. Then in January we are travelling with our daughter and her family to the Dominican Republican for a week in the sun (swim up bars and all) … the same tricky travel issues.  It’s all about the grandchildren, of course. We love spending time with them. Then in the first week of February we leave for southern Portugal for two months. We are running away from winter! 🙂  Of course, we get back in early April and its still winter here probably. But that’s OK because we leave for Goderich again in mid April and will be there until Mid May. That’s springtime in Ontario even though it may still be winter here in Newfoundland.  Once we get back home in Mid May it’s off to our summer place in Trouty, Trinity Bay, get the gardens in, start salmon fishing when the season opens, jig for cod in the summer, harvest in early fall, and eventually we get around to looking at where we will travel the following winter. I guess that’s the retired life… for us anyway. We have to enjoy it while we can because no one knows what tomorrow will bring. I still do clinical work for 2-3 days a week for about seven months (June to December) which helps a lot with the travel. My pension isn’t that good! … in case someone is wondering.

I do most of my writing when I travel, especially during the longer two month trips to Europe that we do most years. It’s in Portugal this winter that I will get much of the writing of my next book, Mary Jane, done. I get up every morning at 5am, write until about 10am, and then Glenda  and I go out to walk for hours. The temperature will be between 15 and 18 most of the time. Perfect for walking. No snow, so slush, no ice. And we enjoy stopping at a coffee shop. We eat lunch out usually. Lots of salt fish dishes in Portugal and also squid, and octopus, and other things.

Spencer, my 6 year old grandson just got up. He said “Look Poppy, I got myself dressed.” We hugged and then talked about the upcoming trip to the Dominican. We talked about how it is warm there all the time. He said he wanted to live there. I said, it was nice to visit warm places in Winter to get away from the cold for awhile, but I wouldn’t want to live there all the time. I said  I liked living in Canada because we get different seasons and can slide and snow shoe and play hockey, but also get warm sunny weather, even if summers are a bit short. He loves hockey. His parents have him in hockey … he scored his first goal two weeks ago.  Spencer stayed over with us last night, that’s why he’s here this morning. It’s about 8am right now.

Nuff for this morning. I should tell you I posted a new Gallery of photos on my website from our trip to Tavira in Portugal last winter. Click here to see the Gallery