Now, this is something to worry about. As I currently have the luxury of eating my  organic lunch of bok choy, sweet potato & free-range chicken, seriously…how are we going to feed the world?  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/03/world-population-7-billion_n_857166.html

Never you mind.   As girls we had our own rite of passage.  It was all about getting fitted for our first (or second…or third) bra.  In my case, it was a trip with my best friend to Ogilvy’s department store in downtown Montreal.  At 11 I had already been walking to school and taking short local bus trips on my own, or with friends since about 8 or 9…it was the norm in my safe neighborhood…but being given permission to go downtown, with my friend, by OURSELVES? Well, that was the be all and end all of transitioning to a tween. 

I’ll never forget that particular day.  Since I was in a training bra, the fitting was for my friend.  I remember being all aflutter taking the Metro (subway) downtown and going through the underground til we exited just feet away from Ogilvy’s.  Ogilvy’s was (and still is) one of the finest department stores with savvy (snobby) sales women peppered all through the store, bagpipers serenading shoppers over the lunch hour, and their famed and now iconic Christmas windows.  The lingerie section was magnificent.  The smell of silk and cotton, perfume and powdered noses was almost overpowering.  My friend was whisked away into the private curtained area that was reserved for modest chest measuring, while I just ran my fingers over the forest of undergarments (frankly, I was terrified.)  But within the half-hour, out came my beaming friend, boxed bra ready for payment. 

What brought about this overwhelming nostalgia?  Last week I was send  a release about a new woman-designed lingerie line.  So, of course, it caught my eye when I saw the beautiful vintage inspired collection.  The products are manufactured in Los Angeles, CA  (yay), and high end in style and price points ($148-$392), but a lovely collection it appears to be.  I’ve not seen the products or felt them, so I’m going on what I’ve gathered online, but I do like Galitz’ inspiration for Good Night Gilda:

I don’t want to give away their “set list”, but I will tell you that they started us off with history of the market itself, followed by coffee and donuts at the Farmers Market and kept us going through to chicken salad at Joan’s (including meeting and chatting with chef/owner Joan McNamara) and ending up with sushi on 3rd street!  All the shop owners, chefs, and owners were truly pleased to see us, they knew our tour guide  (Diane Scalia) very well, and she went out of her way to share the colorful history of each of the businesses in the market and along our walk. 

Because of the number of places that we stopped to taste at along our tour, portions were fairly small, but I’m telling you that I was stuffed half way through the tour (and I NEVER have trouble eating!)  But the best part of the feast was learning history behind each restaurant, feeling like VIPs at each stop, and enjoying a really good stroll with an amiable tour guide.

Whenever I travel abroad, I make walking tours part of the visits because the history of the city, from the vantage point of the street, brings you right into the culture.  Los Angeles, which truly is a driving city, generally has some pretty limited walking tour offerings.  Melting Pot Tours saw the promise of offering walking tours in LA, and in a sense, has brought some of European style travel culture to LA.  Enjoy the photo album below and if you have guests heading to LA for the holidays, or just want to do something really fun and really different in this car-centric city, get yourself booked into a tour.  Don’t wait for the last minute, especially if you have a set time you prefer.  Tours sell out, particularly in heavy tourist seasons. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ve given you another 29,000 words, and likely 3,000 calories, to savor in the pics I took along our tour (kind of a virtual walking tour for you!)  Just click on the pic or on the album title (Melting Pot Tours) and you’ll feel a little like you had a slice of doughnut, chicken salad, sushi, and brazillian meat right along with us!

Melting Pot Tours

A walking tour of the Farmers' Market

Slideshow

View 29 photos

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What is being hailed as fantastic are the video capabilities (yes, great), the larger screen, the HD camera (really good), the ability to upload to your television set, plus a lot of the features that the iPhone boasts — touch technology that is really, really good and makes you feel like YOU are the reporter on CNN playing with the interactive flat panel.

But there a couple of features that I’m insane over. You can have an app for just about anything and more are being created by the minute — which means that any glitches will have a fix-it app in about a heartbeat. (There is a big challenge with searching and sorting email other than GMail, and I’m not too keen on the apps out there yet, but there will be a better one soon, I’m positive.)

And there is a feature called “Swype”, where you drag your finger from letter to letter to type your text or email rather than finger-type it. It’s extremely cool once you get the hang of it and it is pretty fast.

There are SEVEN home screens so you can order your life just the way you like it. It can almost function like a laptop on the road and certainly, for someone like me, who is away from the desk most of the day, yet needs to stay connected to my team in the field and clients trying to reach me, this is the perfect smartphone.

Short of creating long documents or complicated spreadsheets, I can do pretty much anything else with this sleek machine. Now if only he could dance.

Here’s a CNET preview pre-release:

I wear two hats — the first is as blogger/social media consultant.  I LOVE this hat.  When I can tug at someone’s heartstrings, make them feel good in their skin, pass along good info, make them aware of social or political issues they might not have been thinking about, it feels great.  When I can help a small business start to make their mark online and they become part of the online world as a result…ahhh, that feels great!  When I’m prepping for a seminar, I get a bit edgy, because I’m geared for the partipants to come out of the seminar armed and ready to create their online strategy; with every new client entering into social media in this rough economy, they deserve the most bang for their buck – so I have high expectations of my own performance and what I deliver to my clients. 

My second hat is as the owner of a pet services company (Pooch Buddies, for those of you in LA!) — a great business, where I get to spend time with loving animals and their terrific owners, and best of all, enjoy all that nature has to offer.  Green grass, blooming flowers, plenty of exercise and a reconnection with nature that I hadn’t even realized I was missing throughout all those years in the concrete jungle of corporate America. 

As a result of spending so much time in nature, it is no surprise to me that stress gives me that feeling of being boxed in.  And as with any good business model, you have to look to your expansion.  In my case, with a growing business, I simply need more space.  My dilemma has been how to deliver that space.  Would my move take me back to concrete walls in a warehouse area?  Or would it take me to a ranch, where the animals (and I) could delight in nature, but where the business would still operate out of my home environment?  I’ve been taking moves in both directions, throwing it all up in the air like a bowl of spaghetti, and hoping the right answer would stick.  It’s not that I won’t expand.  I must expand — it’s the how that has had me in a tizzy. 

In order to find my path, I go back to my tried and true. I work at my dining room table.  I have a gorgeous office and no one understands why I default back to the dining room table — but it is because of the restorative view of my garden.  That is where I become “un-boxed”, and reminded of the reasons that bring me joy in this new phase of life.  And sitting at my dining room table  today, is what convinced me that the ranch is the right plan.  In the midst of a most hectic day, my dog let me know that she was about to chase the squirrels.  As she ran out, in blew the smell of the roses from my garden.

Heck, I love having dogs hanging around.  I enjoy being an urban gardener and watching my dog chase squirrels away from the fruit trees.    I love having no concrete walls around me, taking my shoes off and walking in the grass, drinking cocoa with my child and taking in the smell of fresh lavendar and jasmine wafting in through my patio door.  I realize I’m sharing a lot of myself personally (well…I kinda, sorta always do that anyways…kinda, sorta all of the time…), so I’ll tell you just a couple of other things that have happened over the years that I remembered while sitting at my table today.  My clients have noticed that I’m really happy.  Not  fake “I’m being happy because my business face better be happy”, but real, in my heart and soul happy.  A few of my clients have ended up quitting their jobs and finding different paths as a result of being inspired to take a leap of faith into an unknown business climate.  It’s not without difficulty, especially when you choose a path of organic growth, but in the end, I am able to find the right journey for me.  Yup, ranch it is.

And…wow.  It has been an eye-opening, astoundingly positive experience.  Unlike therapy, where you dig into yourself, your past, interrelationship communications, family history and patterns, etc, etc, in life coaching you explore issues from the perspective of what you can control, vs. what you cannot control…and then act upon, move forward with, what you CAN control, in the most positive of ways.  For a Boomer, used to controlling my destiny, it is a powerful, fun and enlightening experience — even thorny issues end up revealing the positive directions I can take.  Every coaching session has left me with a result that helps me take another step forward (and some of them have been huge steps!)

So when a life change is on the horizon, or when you want a life change to show up on the horizon, there are two great paths to take — you can find a wonderful life coach and reinvent your direction; or you can BECOME a life coach (you go through a coaching experience along the way) and recareer.  The training school that MY life coach attended is Erickson College and Guido Furlani, Regional Program Organizer for Erickson College, in Vancouver BC and Los Angeles, has passed along the info for their upcoming Los Angeles training program.  Titled “The Art & Science of Coaching ”, this intensive training takes place in 4 modules (April 8 through May 23) , all held at the beautiful Marina del Rey hotel in Los Angeles.

The program builds a foundation for mastery in coaching and assists people and teams to connect with, live and work from a place of deep alignment and motivation.

Completion of the program also gives you the minimum certification requirement to be a member of the International Coach Federation.  For more info on Erickson, www.erickson.edu, and for this particular series of sessions, contact GUIDO FURLANI, Regional Program Organizer at (323) 282.7887 or gfurlani@erickson.edu 

And if you were wondering why you hadn’t heard from me in your inbox lately, that has been fixed and you should be receiving this in your inbox on Sunday morning!