Month: March 2008

The Great Interview Project II: Meet a Peach

Strays are appealing, you want to take them in and feed them, maybe make a cute flier with a picture of the lost critter to staple to phone poles in your neighborhood “If I belong to you, would you please come get me?”

Citizen of the Month and Great Interview Experiment blogger Neil mentioned that he had a few strays lurking around his imaginary neighborhood and that’s how I got to meet a Peach. An Indecisive Peach, that is. She’s just finishing grad school and looking for jobs, but made time out to be part of the Great Interview Experiment. Nice to meet you, Peach.


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Book Review: A Voyage Long and Strange

It wasn’t just Columbus, you know. It was Cortez and DeSoto and Ponce de Leon and some French fop named Ribault and any number of other explorers and conquistadors. They sailed across the Atlantic fueled by lust for gold and their own obsessive convictions, landed on the North American continent, and proceeded to make life hell for anyone that was already there. Sometimes they started out okay, but instead of diplomacy and community building, they opted to steal food and supplies from the natives when their own imported supplies ran thin. In general, the lead up time to Columbus’s (equally messy) arrival in the “New World” was bad news for the locals.

You knew that, of course, but probably not in the exquisite detail that’s currently knocking around in my head. I’m reading “A Voyage Long and Strange” – a refresher course in pre-Columbus North American history. Yeesh, what a disastrous period for aboriginal populations. Yeesh.


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Three Nights in Bangkok

Had we arrived in Bangkok first I’m sure we’d have found it overwhelming. It was hot and the streets were packed five lanes wide in each direction with jelly bean colored taxis, private cars, tuktuks, and scooters. But we’d been in Hanoi, and then Saigon, so Bangkok seemed, well, not exactly serene, but staid by …


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Full Disclosure: Travel Writer’s Income

So, yeah, you wanna be a travel writer and jet about the planet staying in swank hotels and swanning about the beaches and taking in the exotic markets of, oh, wherever. Whatever. Who doesn’t? And this: me too, duh. I thought you should know something: I sold a handful of stories in ’07 and worked …


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Ukulele Open Mic

Can I play you a little tune on my uke? It’s far from perfect, but I’m working on it. And yeah, I can sing it in French, too, but it’s even sadder. Two lines, badly translated by me: “What’s left of the love letters, of the April rendezvous? A souvenir that follows me, ceaselessly…” I’d …


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West Seattle Sunday

It will soon be one year since we left Capitol Hill for quieter, more affordable Gatewood. We still regret that our nearest walkable supermarket is the rather pricey Thriftway. We hope that some day, we’ll get the oft promised seldom delivered West Seattle Trader Joe’s. And most of all, we miss having our Capitol Hill …


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