On October 22, Alex Anderson Jr. died.  He was the creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle, cartoon characters from the 1960’s.  I first read about Mr. Anderson’s passing in USA Today while having breakfast at a Hampton Inn in New Jersey, and it cast a bit of a sad shadow on my bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and me.  I grew up with the flying squirrel and Canadian moose, their buddies, and the villains who tried to bring them down.

I love cartoons and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends was not like the Warner Bros.

By now, most of us are in the thick of it.  Christmas parties, Jingle Bells, cookie cutouts, the Nutcracker, twinkling lights, deadline shopping and wrapping paper.  Hanukkah is almost over, Kwanzaa is eight candle lights somewhere into the future, and we are entrenched in this millennium's second decade.

For me, December will be a blitzkrieg of finalizing projects at work, distributor meetings to review 2010 sales, price negotiations, and goal setting for 2011.  Days in December will fly by faster than a gull catching a winter breeze over the Woods bridge, and before you know it, Walgreen's will have heart-shaped boxes lining the shelves in their seasonal aisle.

I spent Labor Day weekend healing – physically, spiritually and emotionally.

For the last twenty-four years, the holiday weekend has been cause for a vacation for my husband and me to celebrate our wedding anniversary.  Although we have ventured all over this country and British Columbia to celebrate each other, our last two September adventures have been to cabins in the Georgia mountains.  This destination makes it easier to drop my mom off at my brother’s and pick her up on our way back home to Beaufort.  Another plus is that the log cabins are pet-friendly, so Toby the Beagle gets to be a part of our rendezvous.