23 Sunday Nov 2014
Posted in Accommodations
Wait’ll you hear this one. You know that Tom and I have been lucky in our nomading about. We do a lot of advanced planning, true, but people who travel are always subject to surprises. Some of us love that! Saner people understand that it’s a wacky way to live and prefer to stay home.
01 Saturday Nov 2014
If you’ve been following Tom’s new blog, the Foolish Flyer, you know that we spent last weekend in and around Lake Chelan in Central Washington State. Tom’s mission was the North Wing flying toy factory; mine was exploring new places.
04 Thursday Sep 2014
Posted in Travel
20 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery, Travel
“Here’s your Loonie, and here’s your Toonie,” Keith said, by way of greeting at the Vancouver train station, plopping coins into our hands. (A loonie is worth one dollar Canadian—it has a carving of a common loon on it—and a toonie is worth two.) He was providing us with a small budget for our weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Yes, the travel bug has hit again!)
07 Thursday Aug 2014
Posted in Sentiments
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Buzz pauses on the trail to the zoo.
Sometime after my second heart attack I decided to sell my beloved red bike and buy Buzz, the bike I ride today. Unlike my red bike, Buzz is electric. He monitors the effort that I put into pedaling and, when he decides I’m working too hard, offers to help out. Riding Buzz is like being twelve years old again.
01 Friday Aug 2014
Before we begin, some items to consider:
Okay. Now we can talk about the cocktail hour that Louise and I share almost every evening.
30 Wednesday Jul 2014
Posted in Sentiments, Travel
St. Mark’s Square in Venice by Jan Ciągliński. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Without judgment and certainly without malice, I consider Louise to be an obsessive traveler. Consider this quote from the blog: “I live in fear that somebody back home will ask: ‘You were in Barcelona? Didn’t you love La Sagrada Familia?’ No, we actually never got there. And it would be my fault, wouldn’t it?”
15 Tuesday Jul 2014
Posted in Accommodations
Louise’s closet. Miraculously, she was able to accomplish this in eight weeks.
Back when we sold it all two years ago, we wrote about how relieved we were to be free of clutter. Why did we need all those office supplies, hair products, cookbooks, shoes, kitchen gadgets, CDs and fabric scraps? How do such collections happen? Here’s how:
26 Thursday Jun 2014
Posted in Sentiments
We’ve been back in Portland for two months now. Despite a flurry of resettling in a new apartment, reuniting with old friends, and pestering the children, we’ve been ruminating on the meaning of it all, the things learned on our year abroad, and the answers to the questions that people ask us all the time.
13 Tuesday May 2014
Posted in Accommodations, Gallery
Tags
Living room and guard sheep
A bed. Two bedside tables. A pot rack. Two dressers (man am I sick of making drawers!). A dining-room table. Four chairs for the dining-room table. Two stools for the kitchen counter. A metal rack that we call “the appliance garage.” A monolithic wardrobe. Two office chairs. Two office desks (and more chairs—man am I sick of assembling chairs). A TV stand and a tall shelf. Six lamps and a convertible couch.
That’s what we built during the past two weeks. Yesterday the living-room furniture arrived. Blissfully, it was assembled. (That’s it above.)
The Expat Almanac 