Hey, and this way I can see if anyone still reads my blog now it is missing from BLT!
Guess the song (songs provided by my morning ‘exercise list’, which explains the curious absence of my usual Cohen/Tabor/Vega triumvirate):
1. He’s got jet black hair, like his mother
2. And now we’re back in old St. John’s where […]

It occurred to me, as I boiled up leftover asparagus stems for soup stock, that I may well have given up on having opinions on things. It seems that being a [commodity] snob is a valued social trait - it implies that in addition to having an artistic judgement, you also have the technical […]

You know what else I missed about the US? Coffee shops. And since I’m sitting in one right now (or was at the time I wrote this entry), loitering until my next activity, why not begin a series of coffee shop reviews?
This shop seems to be cultivating a rustic mountainy atmosphere, which is […]

Since museums were one of the things I missed most about the US, I have resolved to take advantage of my return by visiting every museum in the DC area. My enterprise begins with the National Geographic Museum, which had the dual advantages of being a: right around the corner from the place I […]

She actually was the first woman he had ever slept with, unless you counted the time on the junior high trip to DC when he had woken up with a jolt to find that the bus had stopped and he had been snoring and drooling on the shoulder of his seatmate for the past two […]

This is the bike that I have acquired, for purposes of Getting Around. I have, so far, in terms of upgrades, added a rack and a lock. Next on the list is a pump (this is what I get for leaving it outside in freezing weather!), a light, one of those reflector things […]

“That’s totally inappropriate.” I’ve heard this expression around, for many years now, and often heard employed in conversations where people who are reluctant to make explicitly moral judgements. In one respect, this reluctance to judge is healthy in the speaker and beneficial for the listeners; it’s an acknowledgement of one’s own limitations, and […]

I was standing on a street corner last night and a bus went by me. Blazoned across its side I read the following
GRAB YOUR SEATS
THE BIG FAST BEGINS
(and then something about the dates)
“The big fast?” I said to myself. “They’re - they’re not talking about Lent?”
And they weren’t, of course. They were […]

(A writing exercise.  You see, as a Christmas present I had gotten these tiny little packets of jelly beans, and I was chewing away on them and lamenting that I had no ideas.  “No more excuses!” I said to myself. “You will write something for every jelly bean in this little packet!  Whatever comes into […]

Okay, that was lame.  That does not give you at all an idea of just how applicable my job skills are to today’s ever-changing world.  I will give you an example of a job skill that I have acquired overseas that could have been uniquely valuable to a company I recently interviewed with.
Companies are growing […]