Category: Not America

There is life and it exists, outside America. Duh.

American Things I Love: Stacy and Bryan

Or, The Continuing Saga of the Toast Rack In a new series I am offering, English Things I Miss, I recently I opined about the great mystery of the toast rack. A mainstay of the British Bed and Breakfast, I found this piece of kitchenware a great and strange object. It is one of the…

The Gauntlet

I love flying out of small airports… There is nothing better than the 15 foot walk from entryway to checkin. Don’t get me wrong — I still reminisce about the Heathrow days, when long security lines snaked around the coffee shops and purse boutiques, and that was even before you the entered security rope maze.…

My Amazing Husband: The Hole in the House

Happy Thanksgiving. Colin and I are away for a few days (guard cat Betty is home and in charge!), but I wanted to make sure I said my Thanks here for Colin, who is, by all accounts, amazing. I won’t bore you with a laundry list, I’ll just provide one or two examples, in images.…

Of Old Wood and Hands Made

Our Farm Table, by David Ellison of Lorimer Antiques We recently had our “new” dining room table delivered to us. It was the last piece of the renovation puzzle in our “green” family room.  It really is green… the walls are not only painted green, but were painted with low VOC paint (low harmful fumes)…

English Things I Miss, Part 1: The Toast Rack

Here’s a new, non-regular segment for you that perhaps will help me cope with the grieving process of no longer living in London: English Things I Miss, subtitle, Though Not Necessarily So Much That I Would Move Back to the God-Forsaken Land of Clouds and Complaining. First English Thing I Miss: The Toast Rack It…

Roadkill Relations

We’ve got the fatties back in our yard, and I am responsible. Squirrels get happy around Halloween here– they love to snack on our jack-o-lanterns, 5 times their size. I encourage it, really, sort of hoping that they will end up just too slow to move, and find themselves trying to dodge the car tires,…

Danny Wallace’s Cup of Tea

Dear Danny, I just wanted to send you a note to tell you that I was thinking about you. I’ve got the kettle on and it happens that way. Whenever I go to make my second cup of tea (especially on a cloudy day), I think of your “another cup of tea and biscuits” moments…

Shona’s Run

Super news from my fleet-of-foot Phillips relatives, Greg and niece, Shona, in Kingston … “This morning, after exactly three months of training, Shona ran the Thousand Islands Parkway Half Marathon (21.1 km). I ran beside her as coach and moral support while Karen played chauffeur, cheering section, and chief photographer. “The weather was reasonably good:…

British Columbia Tour, Part two

I forgot to post the rest of our photos from our trip to Canada, so if anyone is interested, here they are. After we left Jasper, we took the Skeena train (two days) through Prince George and stayed overnight there, (Hi uncle Lloyd and Aunt Jackie!) then on to Prince Rupert. There we picked up…

The Company of Songbirds

Something in the new birdseed has songbirds clamoring at the brass cage around my feeder. Wild songbirds– sparrows, chickadees, blackbirds, nuthatches, purple finches, tufted titmice, cardinals– they have come to visit me at my back window. When my family was here these past weeks, it made me tired. Feet on the floors above, the water…

Roadtrip, Alberta and British Columbia, 2008

Colin and I travel a lot, but usually in fits and starts. The last long, proper holiday we took was to Egypt. This time around Colin took me, along with my parents, on a tour of western Alberta and British Columbia, his homeland. Below is a slideshow of the images of the first half of…

You alright?

John Brandon, the great governor of the Warrington Hotel, was the first English person to truly confuse me with a question. “You alright?” he’d ask, his voice rising up lightly. He was from East London, proper Cockney. His “you alright” was was one of the few things I could actually understand him saying. Except that…

Galway on My Mind

I was juicing an orange this morning when a memory blast of Galway hit me. I didn’t juice any oranges, that I remember, in Galway, or any part of Ireland. I wonder what part of my brain shot me through with a violently lovely blip of those two days a year ago in Ireland. We…

21st Century Tips to Holiday Office Parties

Maybe I wouldn’t have been so inspired to write this if I hadn’t been rebuffed by UBS, my husband’s workplace, two years in a row now. UBS, that beloved multinational banking behemoth, which hit Working Mother’s Top 10 again this year for super companies to work for, hosts mammoth holiday parties every year for their…

That Rakeish, Sideways Smile (-:

Or… The Day Renée Montagne Used Valuable Airtime to Tell Me About a Computer Symbol’s Birthday Back when I was “dating” Wilbur, I swore I would never, ever wake up to morning radio. Will had his radio set to 98.9 and Johnny Dare’s morning show in Kansas City. You don’t need to actually listen to…