I have been making an effort all year to find joy in life. In 2011, it was a slam dunk. Mind you the economy tried it’s best to morph from a Recession to my personal Depression. I watched the value of my holdings do a swan dive with the rest of the world. I calculated along with 50 million of my baby-boomer-buds that I won’t be able to fully retire until four years after I die. But yet and still, there is joy for the taking and it comes in different sizes.

One of the best things I did this year was move to a city I had always loved but never lived in. I am now living in Portlandia, as the train loud-speakers call it in Spanish (so that’s where they got the name for the TV show- duh). Portland, Oregon is like going to the World’s Fair. It is so well planned, kept and infused with the arts I keep expecting someone to ask me to buy EE tickets. Portland just won an award for best city parks in the country…and they are. Rose gardens, azalea gardens, and rhododendron gardens grace hillsides. Intricate Japanese gardens, Chinese gardens and small pocket parks burst forth within the confines of the city blocks. In the suburbs people everywhere are ripping up their lawns and putting in vegetable gardens so if they have extra food they can donate it to food banks. Wish this had been popular when I was growing up. I hated mowing the lawn and dumping the grass clippings in the compost pile we never used was an ongoing debate. “Composting is good.” “But we have no gardens.”

There are tons of cool thing about Portland. People, all shapes and sizes and backgrounds live together in neighborhoods and are happy about it. They know their neighbors. The saying “Keep Portland Weird” is not just about being counter culture, but it’s about letting everyone be their own weird wonderful self. It is easy to get around. Downtown the trains and trolley line is FREE. Yup, free, just hop on and hop off. Did I mention that there is no sales tax? And the social services are marvelous. Oh, and when the police were trying to get the Occupy Portland people out of a park, they first assessed how many people there were homeless and ramped up their shelter bed count so that they were not forcing people to sleep on concrete or in alleys that next night. They talked with participants, did not use force, did not gas anyone. The police respected the right for civil disobedience. The people in return did not taunt the police. People for and against ‘Occupy’ understood that Freedom of Speech for everyone was being tested.

Oh, and that part about it always rains in Portland. Did you know that Atlanta, Georgia gets more rainfall than Portland? That even when it rain there are things called sunbursts? If you sit by a window at work you can look up and see the sun bouncing off the newly watered world all year long. I thought it was going to be like northern Iceland where you’d start chewing your paws by November–in the dark. Not the case. And here’s something for my New England friends to ponder…you don’t have to shovel over-cast.

Another great thing about this year is I was able to travel a great deal. And the year has another month in it and, yes-sire, I’m hitting another continent for New Year’s Eve. The best part of my travel was it is to all new places. Think of all the places I had never been lost in.  This was my chance to see if those Berlitz CDs worked. The answer is, I guess playing them while I was sleeping was not as effective as I had hoped. This year alone I have been lost in Barcelona, Rome, Capri, and Pompeii (it was that Lemoncello shot I tried before going in to the ruins). I got turned around in the ancient brothel and ended up with a Scandinavian group. Nice people but they all sounded like the Swedish chef on the Muppets, “chicky chicky, mork, mork, mork”.

I was lost in Santorini. (Telling me to take a left by the stairs at the blue dome was not funny.) I was lost in Sorrento. (Okay just at the winery sample room. Again, not my fault). I got lost in Kusadasi, Turkey in a 4 block area at the bazaar…if you’ve seen one rug store you’ve seen them all. Well maybe I only saw one. I don’t know. I never did see where they make the taffy or the towels. Ephesus, while built by the Romans in fact did not have a single road leading to Rome or anywhere else that looked familiar. They had a nice library, but no books. They had a large public bathroom with places for 20 or more to sit at a time, but no books there either…and no maps. Mykonos is not built on a grid and FYI if you’ve seen one jewelry store–you have not seen them all. And I got to see them all at least twice inside and out. You’ll be happy to know new inventory is arriving next week.

Athens doesn’t count, people who live there get lost. I did not get lost in the Corinth Canal it has massive high walls and the waterway is a straight line and I was in a small boat.  I did lose my tour group in Malta at the Co-Cathedral, now that was not absolutely not my fault. They need a sign in that place, not for people with ADD. Every inch of the walls and floors and ceiling was covered in intricate decor. The good news is I knew the ship was at the bottom of the cliff, I could even see it. Finding a way back to the ship, was an adventure. But hey, life is an adventure.

But the best thing, bar none, about this year was a very small new member of the family. Matthew Christopher arrived in the Fall. He is now cooing, laughing and gurgling. He sleeps most anywhere, but his favorite place, I think, is sleeping in Gramma’s arms. As someone who blogs, writes, paints, Skypes, tweets, texts (poorly), FBs, Links-In and usually all at once I learned something this year. If you stop long enough to let a baby fall asleep on you and don’t move you can hear the sweetest sound on earth. If you close the laptop, click off the remote and watch the sun filter through the trees onto the floor and wait…you can hear the wee sigh of contentment and joy. It is worth the wait.

And there’s good news. The year’s not finished. Step over the unpleasantness, the red ink, the fears and go find some joy. It is reasonably priced, but NOT in a store near you. It is the pine scent in the air, a bird calling, a squirrel scolding a chipmunk. It is a sunset, a rainstorm, a piece of candy found in a pocket (mostly lint free) just when you need it. It is a familiar song, a child’s giggle and a smile from someone much older than you are. It is in a cheek to cheek dance, a chocolate dessert and it’s finding an old book of poems and rereading them until it feels like hugging an old friend. Hurry you only have 31 shopping days left for your 2011 JOY. But the 2012 JOY goes on sale Jan. 1st just in case you get too busy between now and then with Holiday parties. Your allotment of JOY is waiting for you.