Happiness is being in a warm country the day after leaving a country that is stuck in a deep freeze.

I have discovered the fifth ring of hell, and it resides on an airplane that is stuck on a runway for three hours because the water lines to the bathroom are frozen.

You can learn a lot about yourself through the process of trying to pack a suitcase for a three week trip.

I’m also quite happy to live in Canada so long as I don’t have to shovel.

Blizzard warning in effect, roads are a mess, tons of work to get done, and frozen pipes which means no shower — an omen for the rest of the year, or just bad luck?

The first day back to work after a long vacation always lasts roughly twenty hours, even if the clock only says 8.

New day, new month, new year, new beginning.

Mornings are a weird time for me. I’ve never really thought of myself as a “morning person”. At my core, I’m really kinda lazy and love nothing more than to sleep as much as possible.

When you get older, though, your view on how to treat the morning is forced to change. My alarm goes off at 4:30 on weekdays. an hour at the gym, home to shower and change, then off to fight traffic so I can be at my desk for 7:30a.m. I am typically in bed most nights by 8:30, with a book and a cup of tea. It’s rare for me to still be awake and lucid by 9p.m. No wonder I have trouble finding a date. Who wants to go out with a thirty-three year-old woman who falls asleep sitting at the bar because 9p.m. is past her bedtime?

But weekends are different. Weekends are special. No matter what rules are in place to govern our lives from Monday to Friday, weekends can break the cycle.

I’m typically woken up around 4:30 on Saturday and Sunday mornings. This isn’t because of my hated and loathed alarm clock. My cats seem to enjoy being on a schedule, and for them 4:30 is breakfast. The three of them are better than any alarm clock in the world. I roll out of bed, stumble to the kitchen, throw some sort of chicken-and-fish gunk in bowls on the floor, and then scurry out of the way while the animals converge on their feast. But here’s the part that makes these days so awesome, what separates them from the rest of the week. It’s the part where I get to go back to bed!

I crawl back under the covers to find my spot usually still warm. Covers get pulled up and I burrow as far down as possible. I have the route to thd kitchen and the feeding routine down to a science, so I don’t even have to worry about pulling my glasses off. One minute I’m awake. the next I’m not.

I try to avoid scheduling appointments or making plans in the mornings in weekends. That way I can sleep as long as I want without worrying about when I get up. And let me tell you — I sleep hard on these days. I rarely notice when the cats come to bed, stuffed full from their feasting and looking for a cuddle. I don’t usually register the sun coming in the windows, which is pretty impressive when you consider that my blinds are always open and my bedroom gets direct sunlight in the mornings. During the week, I will wake up every time my phone makes a noise, or a car drives by, or a mouse hiccups in a field twenty miles away. Not on the weekends, though. If Halifax is bombed with nuclear weapons on a Saturday or Sunday, chances are pretty good that I will sleep through the end of days.

When I finally do open my eyes and talk myself into leaving the bed, my first stop (apres le bathroom, of course) is the kitchen, where my Keurig is patiently waiting to pour me my first cup of coffe for the day. Weekends call for something fancy, so it’s usually flavoured coffee, and I froth up some warm milk and fake a latte. I could sprawl on the couch to enjoy my caffinated treat, or or sit at the kitchen table to read the newspaper and sip my beverage. But that would be too…non-weekendy. Nope — my coffee and I are going back to bed.

Back under the cobers I go, drink in hand. Emails and texts are checked on the phone. My tablet hooks me up with whatever events occurred while I slept. The cats are wide awake by this point, and looking for attention. Everyone gets petted and scratched, and goofiness is rewarded with a laugh and a cuddle.

I can’t stay in this bed forever. Eventually, the real world will have to be faced. There are errands to run, dishes to clean, laundry to sort. But for a few hours, two days a week, I can lie in bed and feel like the laziest, most pampered woman onn the planet. And it’s all because of a few extra hours of sleep.

I don’t know how your 2013 has started, but mine really could have been better. Had to work on the 31st (until 1am) and on the 1st (at 7am). Had a good day or day of bliss, and then disaster struck. Well, maybe “disaster” is a little overdramatic, but what else can you call a dual attack of tonsillitis AND an inner ear infection. Walking down the hall was like being in a pinball machine (ear infection = no balance/vertigo = a major case of the head spins). Antiobotics are helping, but I still wish I could do SOMETHING to hit restart. This is not the bang that I was hoping to start 2013 off with.

I was just in the forums for my online course and someone posed a question that I actually had to think about: what is the difference between creativity and innovation? There were about 700 answers to the question, so I figured chiming in with my response wouldn’t make too much of a difference in the thread and my post would just get lost in the shuffle. Instead I decided to post my answer here, so that all of you are forced to read it whether you like it or not.

Creativity is the process of coming up with an idea. It can be visual, verbal, or something that you can hold in your hand. Creativity is the art of sitting down on your couch and thinking of something that you want to build or write or see or feel or create, and giving shape to that idea and a colour and a texture and a sound and a voice.

Innovation can’t exist without creativity, but creativity can exist without innovation. Most people have some sort of creative side to them, whether they acknowledge/act up on it or not. Anyone can come up with an idea. Innovation is taking that idea — that speck of possibility that you dreamed up — and turning it into a tangible product. A creative person can think of an idea for a picture or a story or a new recipe  An innovative person actually creates the painting, book or dish.

Now that I’ve written all this out, I wonder if the question in the forum should have been reworded. It’s not about the difference between creativity and innovation. It’s about whether YOU want to be creative or innovative. Do you want to sit on the couch and think of the idea, or do you want to make it come to life?