Category: Notes and Confessions
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Tiny Notes From Hanoi: It’s Kinda Different With a Kid
Welcome to this exciting new series of (hopefully) near daily updates on our very recent move to Hanoi (like, last Friday)! Between living in a compact little hotel room in an area without walkable sidewalks (but with a fine cacophany of scooters roaring at all hours) and having Thwack full time and having two separate…
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How to Pack for the Person You’d Like to Become
We moved out of our little terrace house last weekend. Our dining room full of boxes is now stacked neatly in the third floor spare room of a sprawling Victorian house in the groovier bit of Leicester. We have a surprising amount of stuff for having just moved here last November with a 30kg…
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What I’m Talking About When I Talk About China
A few weeks ago, I was randomly contacted by someone working for an expat relocation company. He wanted me to write a guide for Suzhou, a city I spent a total of one afternoon in several years ago, interviewing for a temporary job doing localization editing work for a Chinese video game company producing martial…
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This Is Still Not a Mommy Blog (Even Though That’s All I Do All Day)
Before I spawned my urchin, I was adamant about keeping the metalepsical church and state firmly separated. I read all of those books about the importance of keeping your grown up self intact and building a life where the baby mostly fits into your rhythms and routines rather than the other way around. I was pretty…
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A Totally Impractical Guide to Camping in England With a 4 Month Old Baby
Last weekend, we borrowed a car from our crunchy granola car-share group in Leicester and drove to somewhere in Derbyshire (pronounced, approximately, Darbəshr, in case you aren’t intuitively British*) in the cold, grey rain, for a fine weekend of family camping, frantic trail cycling (which we hiked at a leisurely pace) and multi-roomed tents more elaborate…
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The Happiness Project Revisited: Are We Happy Yet?
Yes, I’m still plugging away at the Happiness Project. I’m now more than half way toward the end goal of 100 days of consciously making note of happy moments. I missed one or two days along the way, unable to find anything overtly happy to document. I refused to allow meh to be accepted…
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The Next Ten Days: The Happiness Project Turns 51
Actually, we’re up somewhere near day 53, but I’m not very good at getting my blogging act together. Some days, I really regret having that ridiculous inner drive to actually finish what I’ve started- even if that something is to find something legitimately happy for 100 freaking days. 100 days of happiness when you’ve just…
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Stock Taking (Again): Notes on Preparing to Leave (Again)
How many Ikea POÄNG chairs have I bought (and then sold or left behind) in my decades of careless geographic instability? How many sets of kitchen odds and ends, how many cups and bowls and sets of cutlery? How many bookshelves (and their contents), kitchen tables, armoires (and their sartorial contents) and beds? All of them,…
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Notes on a Thwackless Day and Moving to Vietnam
I am, today, sans Thwack. Just me. For the whole day. For, like, the first time ever. Or rather, for the first time since he rather impatiently forced his way out of me three months ago and proceeded to take over our household and our time and our energy like a chuckling, puking, wriggling, thwacking, cuddly…
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And Now For Something Completely Different: The Happiness Project Roundup
It’s been about ten days since I last told you all about the small, daily details that made me happy. The Happiness Project is still going strong, albeit significantly less long-windedly. It’s all happening on Instagram so feel free to stalk me there, should the suspense of waiting ten days for an update here prove too…
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Day 30: The Happiness Project
Holy crap, we’ve made it to Day 30 somehow. Since the past month has essentially been a blur, I will assume I didn’t space out and skip whole days and/or weeks entirely. A lot has changed in this time, internally if not externally. It has been a curious experiment that threatened to derail a…
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Day 29: The Happiness Project
Yesterday (that would be Day 29, as noted above) we drove en famille to Newark, about an hour away. We belong to a granola crunchy car share group in Leicester and so every so often happen to have a car at hand. This weekend, we had a slightly ridiculous 8-seater minivan at our disposal (the…