Featured pic from Mitchell Lawler on Unsplash Goalposts - goals - get it? The start of a year is an appropriate, if imperfect, time for looking at your goals and urging yourself forward. I think goals should be realistic but ambitious - after all, you only get one...
I came across a blog post today on the Brevity site, by Allison K. Williams, asking about one's writing year: what did you manage to accomplish? The novelty was the positive angle: not what did you promise yourself to do, and not get done, a set of questions I'm...
Tunis today. We walked around till we were almost dead. The sun is so intense, even in autumn! It was 4:00 before we could eat lunch, but when we did... Ravioli Dello Chef for me, Carbonara for Ramon (ever the traditionalist). And a gorgeous salad shared. Hon hon hon...
I tried writing a note to a friend in ze French language. Ouch. We've been studying for months and still, the basic conversations with the front desk at our hotel, or answering people's questions about Catalunya, are so awkward and clumsy I want to press "pause" on...
We made it to Tunis. It's lovely. The weather is divine. Ramon's job looks great, and I can work at his office for now. There's wifi to spare and a cute coffee shop out front, run by a fellow who teases us about our French. But try to get a taxi and... ARGH! The...
ENGLISH ESPAÑOL Last night in Madrid I had my Grand Premiere as an actor. Six women, four different accents in Spanish (Italian, French, Irish and American) and an audience of all our Spanish boyfriends and a couple of weirdos who must have had nothing better to do....
Do what you like When I told my parents I wanted a job where I could do what I like, as a young college graduate with a sociology degree (!), you'd have thought I said I wanted to juggle babies for a living. But they came around, about the time I found a job I liked....
“‘A writer is always in exile,’ she said, this is what pushes him or her to write. ‘It doesn’t have to be geographical.’” From Journalist Olivia Snaije’s interview with three Syrian and Iraqi women writers living in exile: Samar Yazbek, Inaam Kachachi, and Rosa Yassin...
How lovely to hear Chopin in the park, at the touch of a button! The benches have really good acoustics - you can click on the pic to hear a piece from a good videographer called Happy Data Scientist (I'm not kidding) on YouTube. This is the Chopin memorial in the...
You may not have heard of a ThanksWedding. Leave it to my family to come up with a new holiday - Thanksgiving + Wedding, obviously. But who does that? ONLY US, that's who. Because nothing goes better than overeating and dressing up. In Alaska. Striking. Brisk....