Note to my beta testers (you know who you are):

Dear Beta Testers -

We’re off and running! The first 10 folks who signed up way back in January have received their invites and are diving in. If there are no significant bugs, the next 25 of you will receive your invites (by e-mail) this Friday (March 11th), then the next 25 the following week etc.

If you’re not a beta tester and wonder what all this is about — check out my business website, Your Money by Design. My online money-coaching program will be available to the general public in early April, assuming all goes well now that we’re putting the program to the real-world test.

Photo Credit: Will Lion

It sounded easy enough.
And the result was passable. But who wants passable? I wanted Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups in a jar! I wanted over-the-top indulgence! I wanted heavenly breakfasts! And frugal, too!

Any ideas what I need to do differently?

Here are the ingredients. I just used the oil from the organic peanut butter. I suspect the peanuts were too old (I’ve had them in a sealed bag for a couple years. That’s too old, right?)

The next thing that went wrong was that my food processor kept overheating. I was supposed to liquify the peanuts. This took 5 minutes of steady blending (or whatever it’s called). Is it possible I burned the peanuts as they were liquifying?

I ended up getting a jar of the stuff. It looks nice, for whatever that’s worth.

And the next morning on my eggos it sufficed, but only sufficed. As you can see, it’s kind of grainy. Not silky smooth like I was hoping for.

Well I guess it’s not too surprising the Border’s is declaring bankruptcy. The way we read has changed as radically as the way we listen to music. Still, I’m sad to see the demise of anything to do with books.

And of course grim shenanigans in the Canadian Parliament. CIDA unexpectedly denies KAIROS, a respected, ecumenical social justice organisation, $7M in grant money. Except it turns out CIDA didn’t deny it. Bev Oda, our Minister of International Cooperation did. But said she didn’t, which is essentially lying to parliament. The Speaker caller her out. Harper defended her. Nobody’s buying it.

The Canadian Treasury Board and the Dep’t of Finance experienced a serious cyber-attack. Not to worry, the budget is safe.

Great quote from one of my top five money books (“The secret language of money” – not my fave title for it but what can you do?):

Money means less when true inner peace exists; it becomes a simple medium of exchange, free from complex meanings or hopes of enhanced self-worth.

Makes you think, eh?

Yeah, I’ve known some pain. Suffice it to say: You don’t get through your twenties and thirties, boyfriend after boyfriend (in my case) without your fair share of guilt (just not that into him), frustration (why won’t he commit?) and anguish (ohmygod,ohmygod,ohmygod,ohmygod,ican’tbelieveit,ohmygod).

After my second-last relationship, in my late 30s, I was romantically fatigued and had finally crossed the line into Jaded (are there no men left who aren’t gay or screwed up?).

And then almost imperceptibly I fell in love again. This time, with “The One”. He was right for me in every way that I needed and wanted someone to be right for me. He so fully eclipsed all my prior loves that I literally thanked God that the others hadn’t worked out. And imperceptibly doesn’t mean it wasn’t deep and true. Oh, it was. It was.

Some of you know how it ended. I wasn’t right for him.

For 3+ years now, I haven’t so much as dated.

And now on February 14, 2011, Valentine’s day falls on the day of the week I blog about the Art of Contentment.

Here’s the lovely thing. The truly lovely, nearly miraculous, counter-cultural thing: I am deeply contented as a single woman.

I don’t mean in a surface way. I don’t mean in the woman-without-a-man-is-like-a-fish-without-a-bicyle-way. I don’t mean in a it-might-still-happen-when-you-least-expect-it-yadayadayada way.

I mean it this way:

Somehow, after grey,grey days when I seriously could have cared less if a bus struck me and I died, somehow I emerged with an abiding and fierce love of life, its very self. I can’t imagine that will ever go away. If you need a taste of this, watch this film.

And somehow, after weeks and months of focusing entirely on keeping my own body and soul together, somehow I started to enter into the grander scheme of things: that there are really, really, really important things happening in the world – things that were so.very.much bigger than my heartbreaks. And that there are bodies and souls all over the place who could use a friend or a radical to help keep their own body and souls together (sometimes literally. eg. the Congo.)

Important stories like that of Aung San Suu Kyi, who opted to remain under house arrest, a confined, (nearly) silenced vigil of protest for democracy in her country even as her children grew up completely without her and even as her husband died of cancer without her.

Or that a HUGE, VERY HUGE IDEA exists called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And last, I have had enough life experience and enough married friends close to me that I get this primary truth: we are all fundamentally alone. Not lonely, but alone.  Some people go through their alone-ness with a partner. Some of us go through our alone-ness with partner after partner. Some of us simply go through our alone-ness alone.
In all cases, we each have to come to terms with our fundamental aloneness, and learn to settle in to our own individual, unique skin, or risk taking ourselves and our partner(s) down with us.  Just ask anyone married more than 20 years, if you don’t believe me. This is not depressing; it is an acknowledgement of what it is to be human contrary to what most films purport. This is not to say we cannot commune deeply, meaningfully and rest-of-life, with another or with a community (and community is vastly underrated in my opinion).  But always, the fact remains we are our own person, and there will always be a large part of our Soul that stands apart.

About a year ago on a Sunday I was reading cozily in my chair with my two daschshunds snuggled up. All was quiet and yet the air seemed alive with wintery sunshine. It was a perfect, perfect moment. It was full and complete. I was full and complete. As a single woman.

Happy Valentine’s day everyone. Thanks for reading my little blog. Much love to those of you who I know in particular. And strange as sounds: heartbursting love and honour to you, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela, and yes you, Bono and you Majora Carter and you, Franke James, and you Sandra Lockhart and you, Arlene Hache … you all, who while I was churning through boyfriends, you, you were and are challenging and changing the grander scheme of things.