The sun beats down here - if you're in the shade, it's muggy but it's fine. But the sun is so freakin' hot. Motorbikes rule this city. Cars drive slowly because they're automatically at fault if a rider gets hurt. At stoplights the bikes and motorbikes and tuktuks and...
There's my sister, Lady Liberty, and me! I felt so close to the Big Green Goddess after our visit to her island. Kyna had never been to New York, and I'd never been to see the Statue of Liberty. We took a few days between her posts and went to soak up some...
Oh, Mexico. You never know what you'll find. We had rabbit tacos at a roadside restaurant, and outside this car was sprouting... something. I had had a PERFECTLY AWFUL experience at a conference in a nearby city, and returned to the capital with my mood gloomy and my...
I spent all day in the hotel yesterday, Sunday, working like a madwoman. Today is Memorial Day and I'll also work all day. Poor me! It's not the most exciting work, either - the skill sets one uses to create a Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Plan hover at...
Waiting for the bus is disconcertingly normal after being transported to Buenos Aires this evening. I'm outside the Avalon theater in Washington, DC, but just exiting the theater means I was just "somewhere else." A good movie can steal you from time and place and...
The stonework tops of the Persian Baths, Tbilisi Persian Baths. What does that sound like to you? I thought of mosaic tiles and cave-like walls, steam floating between me and several dozen other silent bathers, the drip of water from the ceiling to the tile... It...
What a lovely day. I spent the first several hours of it just reading a novel, sitting on the front patio of the hotel. It felt so indulgent and extravagant. At about 3:00 I finished my book, changed into sneakers and a t-shirt, and hiked up the mountain behind the...
"Your colleagues are waiting for you." That was the first thing I heard this morning - a nice, Slavic voice telling me to wake up and get downstairs to the meeting. The new job has begun. I'm in Tbilisi, Georgia, meeting the team of people here that are...
Most of the people I know work too much. The workweek is far more than 40 hours - more than 50, probably more like 60. It's not like we're attorneys who are making well into six figures our first year out of law school, either. But it's not just dedication. It's...
Second installment. Okay, I learned something new today. If you're not abjectly miserable in your hotel room, don't ask for a better hotel room. The one I had was funky, a bit dark, and the pillows were weird (as if filled with crumpled poster board) - in short, a...