Just Some of Plu and Tony's Joys of 2009

• Still holding hands on the way to the gym in each dawn.
  
  
• So many magnificent friends keeping in touch and visiting with us from across the waters.

• Cruising past 65 in blessed good health.

• Market fortunes recovering and the two-continent, two-boat lifestyle once more on the horizon.

• Golden concessions - half-price on the TGV, $1.75 across Vancouver and $8 movies any time.

• Discovering the wonders of planning trips and riding Vancouver transit in the internet age.

• Plu's watercolours everywhere -1st, 2nd and 3rd Prizes at the Vancouver Orchid Society.

• Her Dijon roofs quilt finished at last, 1st Prize at the Vancouver Quilters Guild.

• Tempus Fugit newly basking under a sun bimini and sheltering under a tailored winter cloak.

• Meanwhile Carpe Diem has her bottom scraped, cleaned and repainted to swifting perfection.

• Zosia and Jeff visiting us on Tempus Fugit, when EuroPassing Paris, Nice and Barcelona.
  
  
• Our Kiwi family finds us for breakfast in a Bourgogne backwater.
  
  
• Extraordinary buys in the Paris soldes - pastel cashmere sweaters, silk cushion covers.

• Tony's '90 Porsche moves on to a loving home and we go car less for first time in 40 years.

• Financing new bikes to wheel around Vancouver and ride into backcountry from Carpe Diem.

• Finding ancient and modern Gruissan, our hoped for Med mooring beginning in 2010.

• Re-discovering the magnificent aromas of baking and eating our daily Vancouver bread.

• Plu and Jeff playing in pen and ink drawing classes while father and daughter work.

• Mother and daughter's spring reunion in Hawaii, tho' leaving Dad & Jeff chained to their desks.

• Lewis and Hathaway taking Morse into another galaxy of relations amid Oxford U crimes.

• Kenneth Branagh's award winning Wallander, a cop on the dark side of Swedish policing.

• Obama rising time and again to the challenges thrown at him, even when honours threaten.

• David Brooks and Paul Krugman's NYT columns of thought provoking commentary.

• Charlie Rose Brain Series - extraordinary conversations on new scientific understanding.

• The Minimalist Chef 's recipes downloaded by Tone and put on the table by Plu.

• Indian summer sailing that seemed like it would never end aboard Carpe Diem.

• Exiting a classic Vancouver November of Toni Onley grey deluges into frosty December sunshine.