April 25th, 2015 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Europe, Friends, Genealogy, General, Travel
We reached out to Audrius about fifteen years ago as we jumped into the quagmire that is the genealogy of Lithuanian immigrants to the United States. He shares a surname with my Dear One and a rather random Internet search turned him up in Kaunas. We grasped at that...
April 19th, 2015 | Architecture and Design, Europe, General, Popular Culture, Travel, visual arts
Art Nouveau is not really my thing—too ornate, too feminine, too precious. I admire certain artists and objects and connect to the focus on materials and their unique qualities, but l would not want an Art Nouveau home or Art Nouveau furnishings, or even much in the...
April 18th, 2015 | Architecture and Design, Friends, General, Memory, Shopping, Travel, visual arts
I was here in the summer of 1970, an eighteen-year-old hitchhiking around Europe after a year on an English-Speaking Union scholarship at Princess Helena College in Hertfordshire, England. My traveling companion, Sue, was a school pal of a school pal, and we joined...
April 12th, 2015 | Architecture and Design, Travel, visual arts
The forecast was splendid: sunny at 71 degrees, which is to say 22 degrees Celsius. We would be outdoors all day. We dressed accordingly, climbed on a train and got to Bruges by about 11:00. The walk to the Grote Markt, the center of town, is less than two kilometers,...
April 11th, 2015 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Europe, General, Travel
I do not understand why one wouldn’t want to cook while on vacation. Everything tastes better in Europe. The eggs are eggier, the butter more buttery and the vegetables, breads and meats so much more dense with flavor. There is a shop a few meters off St. Catherine...
April 11th, 2015 | General, Travel
Mastering public transportation in Brussels takes some concentration. First y’gotta get the ticket machines to work. I couldn’t get the darned thing to take our money! Actually, once you get you started it’s not hard, but getting the thing to speak English and...
January 19th, 2015 | Education, General, Travel, United States, visual arts
Museum labels—you know, those notes posted next to works of art? What’s not to dislike. More often than not they are written in that impenetrable artspeak (of which curators and critics are so enamored) and filled with “facts” and observations the writer believes are...
January 18th, 2015 | General, Travel
You’d think finding a meal wouldn’t be all that hard. My Dear One keeps a small notebook for notes on restaurants he likes the looks of when those eateries are featured on one of the food programs on television. I take that list and poke around the various wikis like...
January 16th, 2015 | General, Politics, Society at Large, Travel
Simply a coincidence no doubt, but at a doctor’s office we visited in Maryland this morning—just back from our week in the Lone Star State—there were several issues of Texas Monthly magazine lying about. I opened the one focused on the performance of Governor Rick...
December 13th, 2014 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Friends, Genealogy, General, Holidays, Memory, Travel, United States, visual arts
Mercy me—is the year almost ended? 2014 gave us adventure, romance, challenges and sorrow. Suspended as I am among so many feelings, none has gravity sufficient to pull me close. What consumes me now are the tasks ahead from collecting the turkey from Rumbleway Farm...
