Castles, Cameras and Creative Mealtimes

The word of the week is sartorial.

October 5 – Fall Time

Is it October already? Wow…

Only a few more months to go until the end of the year.

Until the next Star Wars film.

Until when I thought I would have the first draft of my second book finished.

Until I thought I'd have moved on from my current job, though I'm thankful that I have no need to do so unless I choose that path - things are great and far less stressful than I could have imagined.

Oh, and Christmas is coming too - can't forget that.

I think it's going to be an interesting next few months. My life has stabilized and change for the better, for the most part and whatever stress I'm currently carrying is partially self-induced. While it would definitely feel nice to be in better shape financially, I am hopeful that by the end of the year some other things will fall into place and improve the situation even more.

In the meantime, December 18 can't get here fast enough!

October 6 – Celebs Say: Enough

Even the celebrities of had enough of the crazy gun violence taking place in our neighbor to the south.

I'm impressed by the variety and quality of the celebrities in the video, many of whom that I have a high level of respect for. It's heartening to see media savvy celebs speaking out against the insanity that keeps needlessly taking lives in the US every day.

I only wonder how many more years, and lives, it will take until major changes are effected...

Because that video is from 2012 - nothing's changed.

October 7 – Camera!

What a deal!

Thanks eBay, last week I managed to snag a great deal on a great camera, which I've been wanting to get for some time. While I have a nice 12MP Fujifilm pocket camera that served me well for the last seven years, it doesn't have more than a 3x zoom on it, which is a handicap too often.

Having looked for the last year or two at various cameras, I had decided on several bottles and price ranges to keep an eye out for on eBay. My budget is not such these days that I can spend many hundreds on a camera, nor do I need anything fancy like an SLR: I just need a zoom.

When I saw an auction pop up for a Nikon 830L for $99.00 USD, I jumped at the chance. For some reason, several people were watching the auction but not buying, which was silly as the price was excellent for a camera in perfect condition with the lens cap and strap - it even came with batteries! I didn't care that it didn't have a box or manual, as you can easily get the latter online - and who cares about a box? Added bonuses: it uses 4x standard AA batteries and takes 1080p video!

When the camera arrived in the mail today, I powered it up and was immediately struck by the quality of the pictures that it took: with almost no effort, they all look great. While the manual controls are almost nonexistent, the camera is well equipped with features that mesh well with what I want to do: just takes simple photos with excellent zoom capability( 34x optical! )with the bonus of an optical stabilization system to cut down on those pesky blurry shots.

I can hardly wait to test out its capabilities both inside and outdoors!

October 8 – Nerf?

The internet is oddly strange and comforting both, some days.

Like when I’m sourcing things for a possible new business in the spring, using Nerf guns.

Retail Nerf guns here in Canada tend to run anywhere from $20-$100 each, depending on the complexity of what you're buying. Even if you're buying from wholesalers, the costs generally aren't reduced by more than 10% or 20%, which means a fair bit of overhead if you're looking to purchase 20 or 30 units, plus ammo and accessories, to start a business.

Take those numbers to Internet, and things change radically.

Nowadays, you can deal directly with manufacturers in the Far East, depending on how many units you ordering. By skipping the middleman and having your goods shipped by the slow boat, you can get far more bang for your buck and the quality is comparable or even just as good as what you might find retail here.

Depending on the item, of course.

After only a few hours of researching today. I was pleased to discover that setting up a Nerf business would not cost thousands, but rather only a few hundred dollars. While some companies out there have rather large minimum order requirements, others do not and I've bookmarked several that I'll be checking up on come the spring.

I should order early so they actually arrive by the end of spring…

October 9 – Deals and Castles!

I played tourist today, with my girlfriend, at a castle! We decided to see a local landmark that neither of us have visited yet, an oversight that we felt we needed to correct today.

Craigdarroch Castle was built in the late 1800s, on the highest point of land in the Victoria area with the best view of the countryside around. It was built by the immensely wealthy Dunsmuir family, whose fortune was derived from coal mines, railroads and other endeavors of the era.

The castle is four floors of luxurious splendor, with stained glass windows and less stress carved wood everywhere. The ceilings are all at least 10 foot high, with the main floor being even higher and the sense of luxury permeating the building throughout.

I'd be remiss in trying to capture the feeling of exploring the Castle in only a few words here. Places like Craigdarroch have to be experienced first-hand and not through pictures, glorious as they may be. I absolutely love this sort of architecture and could have easily spent the entire day wandering around the Castle, peering in all the tiny details from behind velvet ropes:

I'll probably go back in a few years and experience it all over again.

PS - as an added bonus, on the way to the castle today, we stopped at Staples to pick up a camera case to keep my new camera safe. Wouldn't you know it that not only did I find a great case on clearance, that fit my camera perfectly ( and was the last one! )but I also picked up a 64gb high-speed card for half-price because of a pricing error on the shelf – what a great day for deals!

October 10 – Museum Gold!

It was another day of exploration – again indoors, but this time due to the weather.

A cool, cloudy and rainy day meant that my lady and I wanted to spend the day indoors, and what better place than the world-renowned Royal BC Museum? We just made it under the wire to see the premiere of the IMAX film Galapagos, which is a stunning nature documentary about the incredible and unique biosphere native to those isolated islands first visited by Darwin so long ago.

After the film, we went to see the main exhibit, which has changed since I was there last year, and it's a spectacular one now: the Lure of El Dorado, the promise of gold!

There was a lot of gold on display, which explained why there were so many security guards wandering around the place. I took some wonderful pictures, with my new camera again performing brilliantly: it's intelligent enough to perfectly expose the image under the artificial lighting almost every time, and I couldn't be happier with how most of them turned out:

Once the allure of gold had faded somewhat, my lady and I went off to explore the rest of the museum. She was quite taken with the natural history section, where we discovered this fellow whose friends have been in the news of late:

As for myself, my favorite place to visit at the Royal BC Museum is always Old Town, part of the Modern History Galleries in the heart of the museum. Wandering around the massive gallery, you can easily feel as though you've been transported through time into the past – I love it! You believe me there all day and I'd be as happy as a clam in a tidal pool.

October 11 – Turkey After All!

Today didn't quite go as planned but it all worked out for the best.  

I had wanted to clean out my storage area somewhat, putting up a lot of things for sale on eBay, but it seems that not everything I stored was complete. My Amiga system, for example, is inexplicably missing both of the mice that I had used for decades, which are nowhere to be found. Without a mouse, the system's value drops considerably and though it's still running smoothly, I can't list it along with the hundreds of other accessories without this most basic piece. So I managed to find cheap replacement on eBay am I'll have to wait until it arrives before listing the entire package. The same went for a few other things that I thought were complete and by late afternoon I had only managed to list one item out of a dozen on eBay - silly and frustrating.

The silliness continued when my lady and I met my parents for an early Thanksgiving dinner. We had made reservations at the Yates St Taphouse, where we were looking forward to a sumptuous meal of three courses. However, my astute girlfriend notice that the menu’s main course had two separate dates listed: Oct 11^th was shown as serving ham, and October 12^th was Turkey.

Since there was no turkey, we quietly left in search of a last-minute place that might meet our needs. Several places that we called / visited told us that it would be close to 8 PM before any space would open up, which was hours away.

Fortunately, because I had checked out the options earlier in the week, I knew that there was still one place nearby that might be able to help us: The Beacon Drive-In. We all drove over there and within 15 min., had plates of hot Thanksgiving turkey dinner set in front of us, for less than half of what it would've cost us any of the other places. The meal was delicious, dessert and all and we all agreed that it perhaps was the best choice that could've been made, even given the circumstances.

Strange how things work out sometimes.

Having a four-day weekend was wonderful and it's incredible to think that there's only tomorrow left to get whatever else I need done before the workweek begins again. It's going to be a busy week two, with things going on every night, including a friend’s book launch and an important business meeting for me, so they'll be little else getting done this week.

Corn, Colds and Controversy

The word of the week is lassitude.

September 28 – Chugging Along

How’s the rest of the world doing these days?

With a federal election coming up in the month, Canada‘s going to be doing a lot of inward-looking in the next few weeks, as people try to decide where the country’s headed.

But what about the rest of the world?

How does the rest of 2015 look, according to the experts?

Well, not that great, when you factor China into the picture. Which is a shame, because I’m just getting used to being able to order things directly from AliBaba.com …

All kidding aside, it’s a weird, connected world that we live in: I was just talking about this with my lady and as she's in the field of statistical research, she knows a thing or two about what's going on out there, probably more than I do.

Without getting into details, we both agreed - for different reasons - that the world's become perhaps a little too interconnected for its own good. Countries are far more codependent on far too many trade aspects to be insulated from one another's problems when they crop up – just look at Greece this summer, and China to a lesser degree. Economic cycles that used to take decades now take only a few years to rise and fall. Which makes predicting them extraordinarily difficult, even for experts in the field.

When you live in the global village, everybody's problems are only a few doors away.

September 29 – Myo

I'm thinking of getting an armband.

Not just any armband though: a Myo, which is a device that reads our movements and translates them into electrical impulses I can be read by a computer.

More accurately, it translates the electrical impulses that it reads from your muscles into unique signals that can be mapped onto functions via computer software. So you can simply make a series of gestures to open a presentation on the laptop, moved to the next slide, rotate diagrams and so forth - all of those are just the most basic application of Myo:

Where it really gets interesting is when you combine a pair of Myo armbands with properly configured software and accompanying drivers. This allows users to play their various games without a controller, albeit at this stage still with slightly less-than-perfect accuracy due to the fact that Myo was only been released to the world less than year ago.

It’s interesting to note that I found reviewers split in their opinions of how well the device works. Bitshift Interactive makes software called ‘Mapper For Myo’ that apparently makes all the difference in using the device, which I found out by reading some of the reviews on the device’s Amazon.com sales page - weird, but useful nonetheless.

I'm still keeping an eye on this device, hoping that it will be more mature in the next year, with support from major software houses for various games and devices. I'd love to be able to forgo having to use a mouse or game controller altogether, so that I can play for more than 15 or 30 min. of the time before my arms decide they've had enough.

September 30 – Prime!

I took the day off today. Not by choice: I was too sick to work.

Monday night I started getting the sniffles and by noon yesterday, the goal that everybody else had made itself known in my own sinus cavities – yay. I sucked it up( literally ) until I got home and from there things just went downhill, until this morning when I started killing Kleenexes at a rate of one every 5 min. or so: there was no way I be able to work in that condition, so I called work to sell the bad news, then went back to bed for a bit.

On the bright side, despite the extremely runny nose that made me wear off at least two layers of skin by days end, I got to catch up a little bit on a few things, including a TV series that I've meant to watch more of this year but haven't found the time: Transformers Prime.

Originally airing in late 2010, the series has one various daytime awards, including several Emmy’s and has impressed me with the quality of both its animation and writing. Among all the other excellent voice actors, it's also a nice touch that the show has Peter Cullen, the original voice of Optimus Prime, reprising his role.

Through the convenience of Netflix, I made my way through to almost the end of the second season by the end of the day, interspersed with a few power naps and other projects. While I wasn't feeling better by the end of the day, I was feeling the worst.

It's been a while since I spent the day just watching TV like this and - I liked it. Looking at my substantial collection of series on DVD, I am again reminded how precious time is to me these days and how wisely I have to budget it… so getting to spend a day catching up was extremely satisfying.

  

October 1 – Doc Says I’m Weird.

It was a half-for me today, in several ways,.

I went to work for a half day this morning, which was probably a bad idea – my nose was still unhappy with me( I'll spare you the details )and I had little energy by lunchtime.

Fortunately by then, I left for a doctors appointment, to see a physiatrist.

I've been waiting to see a specialist of his type for a few years now, to see what can be done for my wrists. Ironically, it’s taken a year for my doctor to finally see that my right leg’s swollen tendon isn’t going to go away with massage therapy and so necessitated the appointment with a physiatrist today.

The results, after an hour’s exam? I’m ‘weird’ …

Or, in medical terminology, everything was moving correctly but as I still have specific recurring pains, the doctor’s going to send me to see a rheumatologist. It was unfortunate that the medical ultrasounds of my arms taken a month after my 2012 injury could be located, but somehow that seems par for the course of trying to get myself back to rights.

I'm tempted to facepalm a bit here, but at least it’s progress. I'm thankful that the doctor listen to me and performed numerous tests to see movements of my tendons and ligaments all over. He did mention that my hamstrings were extremely tight, another reason to suggest continuing massage therapy on a regular basis.

Guess it’s time for more patience.

October 2 – Guns

I was going to talk about the subject of guns here, but I got tired.

That, I think, is one of the problems in the States right now.

Too many guns, and everyone's tired of talking about how to fix a problem that nobody really wants to talk about in a country where people would rather shoot someone to talk to them about a problem.

How mixed up is that?

You can cite statistics until the cows come home to support the view of either side – this is a standard tactic of any political entity - but rarely does action take place quickly. The notable exception of this is Australia, who after a terrible mass shooting in 1996 instituted sweeping changes in gun control that saw the vast majority of weapons in that country removed from the hands of the average citizen - you can read about the results of that here.

I've mentioned before about how crazy it is, in my mind, to believe that in order to stay safe from harm you have to be armed not only at home but while going about your day, and in the minds of many Americans, armed at work too – just in case.

A too-plentiful supply of death means everyone gets a share, whether they want it or not.

October 3 – Farm time!

What a grand day!

As well as dawning sunny and mild, I was able to spend the day with my lady.

After breakfasting at the sublime Adrienne’s, we made our way back to town… but were sidetracked by a corn maze on the way.

That’s right: a corn maze.

But first we rode a train around the property, passing by their Old West town which was still the process of being readied for their Halloween nighttime shows starting in a week or so. It was pretty cool checking around the 40 acres or so of farm on the track, seeing the crops while the train driver told us all about the functioning of the farm and pointed out the fun attractions as we went along.

Things were less scary in the daytime, I must say, but more fun for sure.

The corn maze is an annual staple of the farm, lazy winding paths that sometimes loop and sometimes simply dead-end. The corn is thick enough that can't see where you're going, but there's little fear of being hopelessly lost as the entire maze is only a few hundred feet on aside in total. It was pleasant to simply meander in the bright sunshine with my lady.

Before leaving the maze, we took a detour to wander through the Old West town that had been set up as part of the Halloween events to come later this month. Only about half the electrical setups were working, but the small-scale town was fun to look at, giving you a hint of what it was like to be back in the frontier days again.

A fun time was most definitely had by all today!

October 4 – Media and a Movie

Ripping the heck out of my media collection is going well.

So well, in fact, that I'm running out of room: even with 6 terabytes of space on my Acer Aspire H340 server, it’s getting crowded. I'll have to repurpose a few more drives from older computers in order to move things around, but I'm determined to digitize as much of my TV series collection as possible in the next week and then move on to the movies until the trial period for the software I'm using runs out. I’m only using the single function to rip the DVD’s, but it's been useful enough that when I do get around to adding more storage, I may just purchase the whole program, though I don't know if I really want to use their software to categorize my collection, as are ready have things like Plex that make it even simpler to access my media.

In the evening, my girlfriend and I watched Disney’s Atlantis, a film I haven't seen for probably close on 10 years or more. My lady likes the film and we both enjoyed watching it, even with the logical errors introduced when you have things like people who have lived 10,000 years but somehow forgotten how to write or read…. Guess that slipped by the script editors. Which is surprise, as Joss Whedon wrote the first draft of this movie, but later edits obviously change things around substantially – the Wikipedia entry for the film is a gold mine of information about how this happened and it saddens me in a way that I’ll never get to see the potential masterpiece that this film could have been in the first place.

Sorry about the odd colours for the last few blog entries: I’ve been writing the blog earlier in the evening and adjusted the colours in Word to white text / darker background – oops. And with my sister away for a few weeks, I have the place to myself to Get Things Done - w00t!

New Ideas, Nimby and Now News

The word of the week is compassion.

September 21 – NIMBY

What’s a refugee, exactly? Do you know?

Given the dire situations in many places in the world right now, including Syria, you think more people would be aware of what a refugee is… but they don’t.

Some people just don’t care, but too many others think that refugees are simply people who have decided to mooch off other countries while running away from their problems.

Ignorance, in this case, is not bliss, and some smart people have a lot to say about it:

Myself, I find it shocking how easily people can dismiss the plight of others. How they can assume that many of the refugees are ‘lazy’ or ‘just terrorists pretending to be in need’ to gain entry to other  countries to cause violent mischief.

If you’ve watched the video above, you’ll know that’s a misconception, and a big one.

The world can be( and is, in places, too often )a rotten place. Don’t let it fool you into believing that those in need don’t deserve your compassion, or your help.

September 22 – Childhood

Play is making the imaginary real.

I did a lot of that as a kid, and I've retained the core of my imaginary play time in my creative side as an adult. I'm thrilled that I've managed to do so, as I've seen too many people for whom practicality is a way of life. Where imagination is something that they've sidelined or forgotten altogether under the daily bombardment of the mundane.

Did I mention that I especially liked playing with Star Wars spaceships as a kid?

The video below perfectly captures what it was like for me to imagine amazing worlds in my backyard( or elsewhere )as a child. The professional, high production value video was created as a tribute to a famous filmmaker who is involved in the Star Wars franchise and is a joy to watch:

September 23 – Small Steps

I’d like to stop being a renter one of these days and turn into a homeowner.

The problem is, it's not very practical for me at present, nor do I really need to own a home in terms of just having a place to keep my stuff. The average cost of a detached home in Canada is relatively high, but it does vary significantly from region to region. 

This graphic, based on recent data, shows how much a household has to make in order to afford a home purchase - assuming that the bank will talk you in the first place:

For my own situation, I'm exploring other options.

Mainly, I don't want to be stuck with a house that doesn't suit my needs, which are admittedly modest: I don't have a family to take care of, nor do I have pets that need outdoor space or a hobby that requires a workshop( that part may change, I admit ). There is no vehicle for me to park, eliminating the need for garage and I don't have a whole lot of furniture or other materialistic goods that would require additional storage rooms.

That's why I'm putting together a Tiny House mortgage package to present to the credit union sometime this spring. While I'm a fair way away from being ready to spring for such a shift in finances, the credit union is extremely interested in what I have to say, as it's a new market for them and quite honestly they'd stand to benefit greatly from opening it up here in Victoria( and Vancouver Island in general ). 

My plan is to put together as complete a package as possible, including how local bylaws affect the purchase and placement of a Tiny Home, as well as targeted research from many other Tiny Home projects across Canada and the United States. I want to make it as easy as possible for the credit union to tell me what they can do for me in terms of a smaller mortgage, one that doesn't fit within traditional boundaries of home ownership in Canada but is still extremely feasible to set up.

Wish me luck.

September 24 – Nerf Business?

Nerf has been on my mind all this week, for various reasons.

Apart from the fun factor, I've had an idea rattling around in my brain: could I start up a small business based around ‘Nerf Tag’ and make a go of it, while still having fun with my friends once or twice a month? Given that I can't do a lot of physical activities any more, including my beloved archery, it seems like the perfect fit.

The ideas not as silly as it sounds; there's already a Nerf Gun Rental business right here in Victoria, complete with a website:

NerfGunRentals.com - right here in Victoria!

There's also other similar businesses set up across Canada, including one in Winnipeg, though they seem to be based around the idea of taking the game to birthday parties, corporate events and the like.

That's not for me though; I'd rather not have to transport a whole bunch of gear all over the place all the time, mainly because I don't own a vehicle. That mobile business model is also dependent upon people coming to you and that necessitates advertising in all sorts of places an order to make yourself visible and get the word around that you exist in the first place.

I'd much rather set up games locally in a park, complete with safety signage, waivers and all the necessary details of a small business. I've put some thought into this concept this week and I'll be looking into it further as time permits. I like the idea that it has a low initial outlay for set up and operating costs, with potential for growth into a permanent facility depending on where I locate. The facility would also have the added bonus of not needing much work, unlike a business like laser tag, which has tens of thousands of dollars in upfront costs for equipment and facility modification.

More on this as it develops.

September 25 – 3D Business?

Holy business ideas, Batman!

Continuing my thoughts from above, the other business idea I had this week has to do with laser printing. Well, not exactly: it’s actually laser etching, cutting and engraving.

This month sees the debut of an amazing step forward in small-scale laser technology that anyone can use. It’s best explained by this short, fascinating video:

In a nutshell: until now, 3D laser printers have cost upwards of $10,000 and are complicated to use, though the results can be amazing. Yet, if you don't know exactly what you're doing, it's often a continuous exercise in frustration and wasted materials, not to mention the huge cost of the purchase in the first place. Hence not many people knowing about the potential of what 3D laser printing can accomplish( here's some examples )or even that it exists.

Enter Glowforge.

Designed to be as easy to use as possible, the Glowforge can print on all sorts of flat materials, up to 12" x 20" wide in the base model and much more in the upgraded Pro version. The printer comes with everything that you need to get up and running immediately, as all the complicated software is run over the web, helping to lower the printer’s initial cost significantly.

Now, don't get me wrong: this is not a cheap purchase, nor is it something the average person will have in their home or office. It's a machine meant to create things for other people, or for someone with specific needs… like cosplayers, or others who need its services.

I'll be researching local 3D-laser businesses in the next few weeks, to better understand how a Glowforge might provide me with advantage over other businesses in both market and cost. The initial outlay for the printer may be offset fairly quickly, depending on the demand for what it can do and how easily I can provide such services.

Who knows? I may end up opening an Etsy store, given the opportunity to provide Internet orders for projects such as this… 3D-cut gaming system tiles, custom-sized and low cost:

The possibilities are almost limitless and to be honest, I am more excited this point than anything else. Which means I have to sit down and have a good think about what exactly this sort of thing would do to make my life better financially, while not sucking up all my time that could go towards other things, like writing.

We'll see what the next few weeks bring, in that regard.

September 26 – The Eyes Have it?

My vision isn't great.

All the same, I'm glad that I can see - in general - without my glasses and that I don't need a heavier prescription, but many are the days I wish I had 20/20 vision. Having needed glasses since the seventh grade( and likely earlier, at that )it's really been frustrating sometimes to know that other people see far better than I do far more easily. Sure, I could wear contact lenses, but those raise their own issues that I don't want to have in regards to eye health.

Which is why laser eye surgery has always been on my mind.

However, the unknown long-term effects, coupled with the high cost, have meant that I've never seriously considered going down that route and ditching glasses altogether.

Enter the Ocumetrics Bionic Lens implant.

Developed right here in BC, the lens replaces the defective one in a person's eye in a procedure that takes less than 10 minutes and grants them perfect 20/20 vision once again. As an added bonus, the artificial cornea means that users will never develop cataracts! I also imagine that the lens would be replaceable if a persons prescription changes, and it opens the possibility of additional optical functions, depending on how fast implantable technology develops in the next few years.

Much better than surgery, in my opinion. The creators of the Ocumetrics Lens hope to have Canadian regulatory approval by 2017, which means that surgeries( and their medical results )will happen within the next five years or so - exciting times for people like myself, who tire of glasses and one just to see properly again day to day.

I'll be keeping my eye on this one.

September 27 – Going Well

How are things going overall of late, you ask?

That's both hard and easy to answer for me right now.

My work's going well, for as I've said before, I can leave it all behind at the end of the day and I'm neither physically nor mentally exhausted when that happens. While there's obviously some busy days at times, having a solid team around me as I do right now makes it so much easier to get through the more challenging workdays than at any previous job.

My personal life is doing happy cartwheels of late. I spent a good deal of quality time with my girlfriend every day this weekend, enjoying the good weather outside and watching Babylon 5 when the sun had set. Today we spent a few hours in the morning down at the Yacht Pond, which was fairly crowded with RC boaters, given the sunny skies and warmer temperatures. We chatted up more than a few folks, who admired our buoys and generally made us feel welcome – the president of the local model boat club, the VMSS, even invited us down to the Christmas club dinner, which was again extremely friendly and indicative of the relaxed air that we've noticed whenever we've sailed our Trawler on the Pond.

Financially, well… I'd like to be making more money, but as I said before: I'm holding my own right now and for the foreseeable future. The business ideas that I have above are to try and get ahead, while still keeping my own interests in mind for what I can do in terms of hobbies and other projects… bearing in mind that costs are costs and would come out of my own pocket.

Writing-wise, things are a bit stalled. I'm still struggling with the middle of Book 2, where the plot lines all tangle; getting those sorted out has been quite frustrating these last few months. I've taken it upon myself to focus just on getting the plot sorted for now and once that's done, the words will flow once more.

There are other frustrations, for the most part they're fairly minor. As lives go, mine's doing pretty well of late. I just have to discover the right balance of time spent on work, rest and play, finding out what's really important to me for the next few months and budgeting what's needed on a day-to-day basis.

Getting six hours of sleep a night, with a few interruptions, isn't conducive towards feeling rested. Thankfully, the next month will see a big reduction of interruptions, especially after my sister spends a few weeks vacationing in Europe, which she definitely deserves - she's been dreaming of going to Paris for years and finally, she's getting her heart's desire..