As Thanksgiving weekend is upon us, I would like to share a few tips with you regarding how to have a successful turkey dinner for the holiday.

Anyone who has done it knows that cooking a turkey for a diverse extended family is not entirely without its problems. But there are a few things you can do to avoid stress during this special family time.

The first thing you should do is assign specific tasks to relatives who want to help, being sure to grant autonomy to that relative over that particular task. I learned this the hard way, when one Thanksgiving my mother-in-law blew up at my father for interfering with making the gravy. He just could not fathom anyone wanting to add ketchup to turkey gravy, and felt so passionate about it that he wrenched the ketchup bottle from her hand mid squirt and wouldn’t give it back.

Honestly, if I hadn’t been right there I think she might have decked him.

Next important tip: never leave large animals alone in a room with a turkey. At a Thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws one year, my black lab nabbed the roasted turkey off the counter and devoured it in a matter of moments, aluminum foil and all. I have to give my mother-in-law credit, she was fairly reasonable about the situation until same dog upchucked the entire thing on the new beige carpet of her den floor within a half hour of eating it. It’s nasty stuff to clean up, that turkey barf.

And it is imperative that you dress appropriately for turkey dinner. I don’t know about your bunch, but the people in my family literally salivate at the mere hint of turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy, and unless you’re prepared with an elasticized or drawstring waistband on your pants, the price tag for the ensuing gluttony can be awful pain.

In our family, everyone shows up for turkey dinner in their ‘turkey pants’. These are generously cut sweatpants that can accommodate a seriously distended gut due to a lusty turkey binge. And you don’t have to compromise style.

We’ve found that turkey pants can be dressed up nicely with a sports jacket (for men) or a pretty blouse (for women). For Christmas turkey dinner I find a festive corsage really helps to dress up the turkey pants.

Then there’s always some Smart Alec in the group with a test for even the most devoted family member. This happened one year at my parents’ house, where, as we were all seated around the dining room table enjoying our meal, my well-meaning sister-in-law asked everyone in turn to say a few words about what they were thankful for.

It was obvious to me that she had rehearsed the subject with her own children, because they all came up with impassioned statements about what really had meaning for them in life. Her youngest daughter made an emotional speech about nature, another daughter talked about friends and family, and even her son contributed an impressive comment about good health.

When it came to my kids’ turns, I feared their answers were going to completely miss the mark, and I was right.

My oldest son grunted a couple of words about snowboarding.  When I pressed him for something a little deeper, he looked at me blankly and burped.

My daughter spent a little more time thinking about her answer. She said with great emotion that she was thankful for the new after leg shave moisturizer she finally found at London Drugs after searching for the stuff for weeks.

My youngest son was champing at the bit to give us his thankful spiel. Tommy at twelve was, and still is, tremendously thankful for golf. But even more than that, he is thankful for the golf channel, and all the joy watching it brings into his life. Why, I believe I saw a tear come into his father’s eye as the boy spoke.

Even though my kids are adults now, I try to slide in a few hints before our big family Thanksgiving dinner, just in case the ‘I’m grateful for . . . ‘ game comes up.

For example, I finish almost all of my conversations with them with a statement something like this: “You should be thankful for your mother, who has sacrificed everything for you,” or “You should be thankful for your health, without which you would not be able to play golf,” or, better yet, “You should be thankful for having a wonderful family, even if we all wear sweatpants out for dinner.”

There. Now that I’ve shared my tips for a successful Thanksgiving dinner, I wish you and your loved ones a warm and wonderful holiday weekend.

I have to go now, and dig out my turkey pants.

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that online dating has totally taken off in the last 10 years. I read recently that one in five are currently in a relationship with someone they met online, and 17 per cent of couples that got married in the U.S. met on a dating site.

It’s no surprise to me, as I am living proof that even a middle aged broad with two failed marriages behind her can find true love in the great sea of online dating.

Two years ago I met an American man on a golf dating website. (I’m a golfer, and I was lonely — you do the math.) At the time I was working for a radio station in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I’d gone to the heart of the Canadian Prairies for work and to get a little distance from some personal drama in my life. But even though I had a high profile, very fun and very social job, I missed having a man in my life.

On a quick visit home to Vancouver, my younger brother suggested that if he was single and looking to meet someone, he’d try the online dating thing. He encouraged me: “You’re a good golfer Shannie, and you don’t look half bad. Surely there’s some nice guy out there who wants a gal to golf with.” I decided that he might be right, and when I got back to Saskatoon, I posted a brief profile on a dating site for golfers.

In the first 24 hours I got several ‘hits.’ I heard from a 60-year-old stockbroker in Oregon who suggested, in capital letters, “LETS MEAT IN HAWAII” (his spelling, not mine). There were emails from retired golfers, and Catholic golfers, and bald golfers, and one really short golfer. I think he was a dwarf, but he didn’t specify. And oh yes, there was a dangerously juvenile looking golfer who was looking for a MILF. (I wasn’t sure whether I should be flattered until I googled it.)

The truth is, I didn’t expect much when I first signed up, since I knew geography was potentially a problem for me. For all its charm, Saskatoon is in the middle of nowhere, and I had a hunch that not a lot of prospective dates would want to travel to Saskatoon for a ‘get to know you’ coffee.

However, a day later I received an email from a fellow in Spokane, Washington. Despite being American (and a Republican) his email was entertaining, flirtatious, informative, and more importantly, literate. Call me fickle: I fell in love instantly.

You’d be amazed at how quickly things can heat up before you even meet someone in person. After a week of feverish correspondence via email, text, and online chatting, my American cyber-suitor boarded three separate flights to get to Saskatoon and we met face to face.

I won’t go into the salacious details of our first visit; suffice it to say that despite some initial nervousness, our online attraction was affirmed with a real-life connection that was pretty hot. And after visiting back and forth for a few months, we decided to give the relationship a serious shot by moving in together. What that meant was that I would move to the U.S., which I did, much to the concern of everyone I know.

Despite the hurdles the United States Customs and Immigration Service has thrown in our path, ours is an online dating story with a happy ending. It’s been two years now and we’re engaged to be married, something we’ll do just as soon as we get approval for the K-1 Fiance visa we’ve applied for so I can live in the U.S. legally.

People often ask me how I ended up with an American, and when I tell them we met online, they’re surprised. You shouldn’t be though, because for my generation (I’m 55) online dating makes great sense. Most boomer singles are either divorced or widowed, and we know what our personal values and priorities are. We’re pretty savvy about our fellow man (or woman), and it’s easy to screen prospective suitors without having to even leave the house, which is good because most of us are still busy with careers.

Now I know not everyone gets lucky as quickly as I did online. In fact, my partner tells me that he was on and off the golf dating website for five years before he found me. Still, there are a ton of specialized dating sites for baby boomers, and if you’re single, and lonely, I urge you to try one. Be patient, honest, keep an open mind, and just go for it. You never know, you too could meet the catch of your life.

I could have sworn that I was there the very minute the tide turned.

I witnessed the turn at a place here in Comox called Goose Spit.  I take Frankie (my 16 month female black lab) there regularly, because when the tide is out it’s a magical world. Most of the beach at high water is rocky so we don’t go then, but as the tide recedes huge tracts of sand appear, with warm shallow tidal pools and all the rich and strange sea life the West Coast of Canada has to offer.  There is what seems to be an endless soft and sandy carpet that stretches along the spit on the leeward side, and its no wonder in the summer the beach is lousy with people looking for sunshine and warm swimming waters.

But in the winter the Spit belongs to the doggie people.  Today, with the howling winds and pouring rain, the Spit belonged solely to Frankie and me. Oh yes, and all the strange and glorious birds, crabs, urchins, starfish, insects, and kelp that inhabit the newly exposed beach at low tide there.

I was prepared for the weather.  I had put on my waterproof coat and gumboots, and loaded an umbrella, towels, ball and an excited dog into my car, bracing myself for a wet walk on the wild side.

And wild it was, to begin with.  The wind and rain pummeled the big golf umbrella I was hanging onto, and I almost lost my grip on it a couple times.  Frankie seemed oblivious to the elements though, as she chased down the beach after her ball, ever on the prowl for the crafty gulls that were fishing bullheads and the like in the shallows at the waters edge.  Every now and then she would pause in her pursuit of the ball to take a stab at one of the little fish skittering about there herself, then she’d give up and return, ball in sandy mouth, to my side.

About half way into our trek the sky brightened somewhat and the rain eased off to a light drizzle. I put down my umbrella and noticed, just coming out of the rough dark waters about ten feet away, a small seal.  At first I was startled, as it appeared to be heading directly for me.  I called to Frankie who was also heading directly for me on a return trip with the ball, because I wasn’t sure how she would react to the little seal that was pulling itself out of the water and up the wet beach.  Frankie chases deer around here, and any other wildlife she sees so I was worried she would have had at the seal too.  I just couldn’t stand the thought of the little seal being tramatized by a barking dog, and really, who knows what would have happened then.

When Frankie dropped the ball at my feet I rushed to pick it up and throw it as far as I could away from the seal and me, and thankfully she took off after it without noticing our visitor, who continued to hump up the beach just behind me. It was so strange. You know, I’ve lived on the West Coast all my life and I’ve never seen anything like it.

We carried on with our walk in the gusty winds, and ten or so minutes later we came to the end of the spit where the sandy beach subsides into the sea and there is no where left to go.  I turned around to walk back, and in the next few moments I noticed what I discerned was a subtle shift in the water.  On the way out to that point I was certain the tide was still receding.  But something had changed by the time we got to the end of the spit, and it was, I realized, that the tide was turning. The rivulets of sea water that rushed toward the water on our way out were widening into little rivers, and the ocean was beginning the inevitable process of reclaiming the beach.

Now I’m not the sort of person to look to deeply into every day events for meaning or divine enlightenment, yet something about seeing the tide turn feels metaphorical to me.  I’m in the midst of an exile here that has had me uncharacteristically depressed for three months.  But something has happened in the last week or so, and I find myself increasingly in a calm, accepting, and appreciative place.  In fact, I believe that the tide has turned in my own small universe, and from here on things are going to get better.  Now whether or not that means that I’m at the halfway mark of the visa process, I don’t know.  I hope so.  But I’m definitely at a turning point in my own attitude about my situation, and I think I can now see the end, and I why I’m here more clearly.

We walked back down the beach; Frankie frolicking with her ball in the sand, and me marveling at how, once again, that goofy dog provided me with the motivation to get out and experience the day.  The clouds soon launched another thunderous shower, but on our way back there was no sign of the little seal that had beached itself just a half hour earlier.

I’m not a religious person, but I have to confess that my hour at the Spit today was, simply, ‘inspired’.  And I have my dog, Frankie, who is currently snoring at my feet, to thank for that.

There was a major health headline in the news today that went something like this:  Diabetes strikes ‘staggering’ 366 million people.  The International Diabetes Federation says that 4.6 million people die of diabetes every year, which translates into one death every 7 seconds caused by the disease.  And it costs somewhere in the vicinity of $465 billion a year to fight the disease.

Now those are some scary numbers to be throwing around, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I have been identified as one of the potential victims of diabetes, I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to the news.  I’m not an obvious candidate because I live a reasonably healthy lifestyle and other than fighting fifteen pounds of excess flab endlessly throughout my adult life, I’m not what you’d call obese.

However, on my last visit to my GP (one of the reasons I had returned home to Vancouver from the US prior to getting married) I had some blood work done. And just after I was tested I got a message on my cell telling me that I had to get back into the office asap to speak with the doctor about something called ‘impaired fasting glucose’.

Now having slightly elevated blood sugar levels first thing in the morning is hardly an earth shattering diagnosis, but my doctor is tough and she doesn’t put up with any of my excuses for not being pro-active about my health.  And as far as she’s concerned, even though my blood sugar levels are not yet dangerously high, they are high enough so that I qualify as ‘pre-diabetic’.  If I don’t do something to get my blood sugar levels back down to the normal range, she says I’ll get diabetes and die.  That’s what she told me, in no uncertain terms.  ”Shannon”, she said, “either make some changes or you will die of diabetes.”

The good news, according to the experts, is that my condition is totally reversible. Just some minor tweaking of my rather casual lifestyle that includes eating a diabetic diet (translation: bye-bye everything yummy), drinking alcohol only moderately (one drink a day for women – what’s the point?), and making sure I exercise on a daily basis (incuding 20 minutes of aerobic exercise), and I’d have things back to normal within a few months.

Well, I was in a pretty depressed state anyway, having just been told that I could not return to the US (my home for the last year and a half) anytime in the near future, so I seized the opportunity to make the required changes in my life.  I quit eating the bad carbs (refined sugars, white pasta, rice, potatoes, everything good), beefed up my daily exercise with a gym membership that I actually used from time to time, and cut my somewhat frisky alcohol consumption down to next to nothing. Now these improvements haven’t been much fun, but I have lost 15 pounds in 3 months, and I’m so gosh darned alert in the evenings now that I’ve taken up some serious knitting projects.

But let me tell you what has actually been fun, and who knew?  I was being so good about diet etc., that I decided that I wanted to be able to measure my blood sugar on my own, without having to go to a clinic.  So I bought a test kit at Costco, learned how to use it, and spent the next month pricking the soft sides of my fingers and measuring my blood sugar, and then charting the results.  I tested first thing in the morning, and before and after meals.  In the name of science (a subject I was never very good at in school) I tested myself, my dog, my dude, and anyone who would let me prick them with my testing gizmo.  And that’s been really fun.  (Well, except for the sad night when instead of raw veggies as appetizers I devoured that big toffee bar, followed it up with a half bottle of Pinot Grigio, a large bag of Salt and Vinegar potato chips and a bowl of Oreo Cookies and Cream ice cream,  and my blood sugar soared and didn’t come down for 2 whole days.  Still, Something about giving myself up for science made those indulgences almost worthy.)

Anyway, my point is this: in a perfect world we baby boomers would all have blood testing kits so that we could see how lifestyle changes positively impact our health, because seeing the evidence on a blood testing strip is pretty convincing. I discovered that the single most positive factor influencing my blood sugar levels is exercise.  As long as I eat a relatively low carb diet and exercise every day, I’m fine, so that’s what I’m doing.

Diabetes has gone global – and the epidemic is getting worse.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that most of us can prevent diabetes from developing with simple lifestyle changes, and maybe even have a little fun with a prick.

Okay, I know I’m a little late out of the gate for this revelation about the 46th Vice President of the United States of America, but Dick Cheney’s new book “In My Time” is still fresh off the presses, and I feel compelled to write about him.  Now lest you think that my life in exile (I’m in Comox, BC, Canada awaiting a K-1 Fiance Visa – story to follow) is so boring that I might be tempted by a political memoir, allow me to explain. My youngest son, Tommy, is, for some strange reason, a serious fan of this type of literature, and while visiting said scion on the weekend, I noticed Cheney’s book on his desk.  I commented on it, in my snide, anti conservative fashion, and with one quick remark, he changed my opinion of Dick Cheney forever.

“Mom” he said, with just a hint of mischief in his voice, “Did you know that Dick Cheney has two black labs, one named Jackson, and the other named Nelson?”

Allow me to explain why I was so impressed by Tommy’s remark.  I am the ‘handler’ of a 16 month black lab named Frankie, and have had black labs most of my life.  They are the only breed I think I could really love, for a variety of excellent reasons.  No matter what else you may think of Cheney, he obviously has great taste in dogs.

Furthermore, my paternal family name is Nelson, and my maternal family name is Jackson. That’s right:  Dick Cheney’s two black labs have the noble names of my mother and father. Seriously, is that a meaningful connection or what!

Politics aside, I had to ask myself “can Dick Cheney really be that much of an asshole, given that he loves black labs and has given them my very own names?”

My sweetheart in America (the guy I met on the golf dating website that I am going to marry if the US authorities ever let me back into the country) was thrilled when I told him I was going to write about Cheney.  ”You have to read the book, of course”, was his comment. He’s a free market Republican and a news hound who lives and breathes US politics.  He’s downloaded Cheney’s book onto his Ipad and can’t wait to read it.

And you know, I’d like to be able to get through a book like Cheney’s, but my skeptical Canadian gut tells me that politicians’ ‘memoirs’ do not necessarily provide accurate, unbiased accounts of historical events. And even if Dick Cheney’s account of his White House years was accurate, I’d be way more interested in the book if there was some ‘salacious’ stuff in it.  It doesn’t appear that Dick, despite his somewhat suggestive name, has much ‘salacious’ material to write about, so it’s all pretty dry to me.  Besides, Donald Trump commented on Cheney’s new book without reading it, and if he can do it, so can I. (For the record, Trump said Cheney’s book was full of lies and that the man himself was angry and nasty – all reasons Trump will not be reading “In My Time“.  He probably wouldn’t care about the dog thing anyway.)

Which brings me back to this blog.  When I mentioned to a few friends that I was going to start writing again, they were mostly enthusiastic about my plan.  But when I suggested I was going to start with my new found interest in Dick Cheney, I got some decidedly negative feedback. “But he’s the anti-Christ Shannie” was what one of my Saskatoon golf pals opined on my Facebook wall. You see, something I’ve witnessed since meeting my Yankee dude and spending some time in the US, is that we Canadians have become openly critical of our Southern neighbours, and unapologetically so.

I happen to be a strong minded mostly liberal leaning Canadian woman who is planning to live in the USA, for better or worse. And I realize that if I’m going to be happy there, I’m going to have to make new friends, maybe even Republican ones.

So I thought I’d start with Dick Cheney.  After all, the 46th Vice President of the USA and I clearly have a serious bond.  It’s just possible that despite his politics and total lack of sexual appeal, Dick Cheney could be my new bff.