So....it's 3am and the cancer-stick is swirling dreams again.
I'm in an aquatic centre with far too many people, all in the yellow and red uniforms of the life guards.  They're everywhere, squirting surfaces with cleaner.  They block my path.
I can't find Claire.  I run into changing rooms, food areas, calling "Claire!  Claire Booker!" I am stared at.
Then I see her, waiting alone and very still in a corner.  I run up to her, and she says, "I thought I should stay in one place, Mum.  But I knew you'd find me, and I'd be safe."
And that's what makes all of this so very, very hard.


But to finish on quite another note, just what did sad insomniacs do before the Internet?  Before they could rise in the dead of night and have a discussion with some hairy truck driver in Birmingham posing as 'Cindy from Seattle'?

Our three day trekking expedition, with Dom, Yvi and Jamie Oberholzer, into The Lakes (Shepperd, Taylor and Sumner) started inauspiciously when the two long-drop toilets at the hut were found on their sides.  Blown over, probably.  The "foof" sound was my hope of a flush toilet fading into the picturesque sunset. 
John's uncle Ted, and his wife Sandie, had kindly allowed us to use their hut (The Shiver Inn) which sleeps 7. Little Jamie, almost 2, had a cot.  We were at the hut within two hours, after a leisurely stop at Loch Katrine. Very generously, Sandie's son Jim Greenslade and family had loaned us their horse float. 
Most cunningly, the hut had an outside bench with running water and a permanent campfire with grate and billies.  Yvi, no stranger to the Great Outdoors, soon had a stew bubbling. 
The Bookers didn't do so terribly well with packing.  I forgot the bread, while John did not step up to the role of Toilet Paper Officer.  The girls all failed to pick the sunscreen up off the table.  Thankfully Yvi had the bases covered. 
Fern, who joins me in Not Camping, also could not come to grips with instructions about digging holes in the forest when nature called. We let Nature know there was a time and place, namely Friday evening back at home.
On day two the trekkers headed over the hill to see Lake Mason, while I watched Dom pull up a lovely trout.  He smoked it for lunch and it will go down as a Memorable Meal in our lifetimes.
While I don't rough things very well, and I was plagued with headaches, getting into the magnificent high country is just one of those things we Kiwis can do any time, for just the cost of the petrol.  There were lots of people camping with family at Loch Katrine, kids splashing about in clear water, kayaking, fishing....
Here's an ode to anglers everywhere.
Birds singing on my shoulder
In harmony, it seems,
How they sing,
How they sing,
How they sing.
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,...
There's something in the water,
Something in the water..."

By Brooke Fraser

Well, here we all are then, staring at the ghost of Christmas past!! I still have mince pies in the freezer (made too early, buried too deep and forgotten), Christmas cake going strong, a ham in the freezer (because Aunty Sue, who hosted Christmas so wonderfully again with Uncle Charlie, already had one), three trees up and several appointments with boxes of chocolates still to keep.  I laugh as I open the pantry and recall the times I have told my girls "that chocolate has my name on it" because they have taken it literally and the chocolate they received this Christmas is emblazoned with their names in permanent maker!!
Not that THAT would stop me when the cooking chocolate had gone.
Mercifully I have stopped taking the steroids which forced me to eat everything in sight (and even some stuff that wasn't).
I'm feeling very pooped, probably a delayed reaction to the radiotherapy but possibly a response to all this heat!, and quite headachey.  See the oncologist in a week so will find out if there are more plans afoot for treatment, or if we just wait and see.  Meanwhile, my sister Marnie has been able to source me some lingzhi mushroom capsules - an ancient and highly respected Chinese medicine - which have a wicked, wicked aftertaste but I'm thrilled to be able to take.  They might possibly inhibit tumour growth or prevent tumours forming.  Watch this space, I guess.
John's been planning a horse trek with the girls to Lake Taylor/Loch Katrine area, but the horse transport is proving tricky.  Just a light trek, about one hour's ride in to a hut, an hour's ride the following day to the natural hot springs, and back out.  Honey, "my" horse on loan from Laurie O'Carroll will be ridden by Fern or Claire, and I will be in the truck with the supplies.
Looking forward, the following week, to a gift from Marnie and Genevieve of a girls' day out in town, featuring a pizza lunch, a trip around the Arts Centre and some jewellery-making at Beads Unlimited for the girls, a beauty treatment for me and an ice-cream for the girls at the mall, all topped off with a couple of games of 10-pin bowling!  Great fun!  At our current rate of outings, that's a year's worth of entertainment in a day!
My kitchen is my bolt-hole, and am enjoying a fabulous frypan, to which nothing will stick, from Mum and the Annabel Langbein cookbook from Mary. Angela Clifford and her sweet son Flynn today gave us some organic strawbs and a couple of fig trees, while Janine Youle from next door has given us a jar of beetroot relish she made with the bounty from their garden.  We live well!!!
My very best wishes to all for 2011.

And from James Blunt once again (it's one of the few CDs I have with me right now), plus it reminds me of the lovely house we rented at Amberley Beach, where I once woke to see the sunrise, plus Hector's dolphins frolicking in the waves. 

"Beautiful dawn,
lights up the shore for me
there is nothing else in the world
I'd rather wake up and see."

High, by James Blunt