On Defining Success

From time to time I get bogged down, lost in the weeds, wrapped up in all the sausage making and inside baseball stuff behind blogging. I’m genuinely interested in how this stuff goes down, after all, I owe a great deal to blogging. I write occasional commentary, meta crap that comes under the heading of …


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Forgotten But Not Gone

My Dad doesn’t really know who I am any more. I think he’s aware that he’s got a daughter out in the world, and that her name is my name, and she has certain qualities that I have, but he doesn’t associate those things with my physical self. Dad, who was a mathematician and a …


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A Hui Hou, Uncle Bill

Uncle Bill Tapia passed away at 103 years old. I got to meet him when he was approaching 99, he’d just bought a house and joked that he was on a 30 year mortgage. He was teaching at the Kalama Days of Discovery, a festival that acknowledges and celebrates the connection between Kalama, Washington and …


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Stories about Reading

I love it when the bloggers participating in Passports with Purpose (PwP), the annual travelblogger’s fundraiser, make the cause personal. I love it when they tie their experiences, either out in the world or at home, to what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I’m of the “All politics are personal” school of thought …


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Give Ten Dollars, Fund a Library. And Maybe Get a Fabulous Prize.

It’s that time again, we’re opening our fourth annual fundraiser for Passports with Purpose. This year we’re supporting the literacy program Room to Read — I’ve written about why I like this cause here, but that’s not what I want to tell you about now. Right now, I want to tell you that I have …


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No Longer Waiting

I used to have a line in my bio that said I was “waiting for Conde Nast to call.” Well, that has happened, in a few different ways over the past few years, though please don’t think I was just sitting at home wishing, I actually did some things that caused it to happen. Anyway, …


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