It is Saturday morning.  I am back at home in the Balkans.  Sadly, within a few days of returning home, we received a phone call from England.  I've been asked to fly to Cornwall to tutor a child.  On the bright side, the living conditions should be good.  I will be in a castle.  There are beautiful hikes, cliffs, and waves.  It has been agreed that their chefs can cater to my diet.  The castle currently serves as a hotel and restaurant.  I do not expect similar conditions to what I had in Ireland. On the less bright side, I had really been looking forward to a few weeks back at home.  I had been looking forward to the nutrient-dense food of this part of the world, to having and using my own kitchen, to long walks, to long hours in the early mornings alone with my laptop and a heater at my feet, to catching up on the various financial tasks that pop up and accumulate and need to addressed every few months or so (especially during tax sea...

I am home.  We had an overnight near Istanbul International Airport, explored the area around the hotel by foot, had a lovely Turkish lunch, were appalled by the prices in the airport (anyone care for a 20 Euro glass of wine or a 6 Euro tiny glass of sparkling water?), and had a relatively smooth and uneventful flight and taxi ride home. I believe I did well on the flights.  I listened to some audiobooks and read some Kindle books on the subject of writing, and I watched pieces of two movies that have been mentioned in some of my books as plot examples (Casablanca and The Fugitive).  It was, overall, not a terrible use of the time.  I've done worse. I am at home now.  At my own desk, with my own kitchen.  It is always an ecstatic relief to be at home after having been at others' mercy for a period of time.  Being a house guest can be highly overrated.  I have a clean kitchen to go to now, where I can prepare my food and my home remedies whenever I...

It's Saturday morning, I've been up for a couple of hours, and I don't feel like writing.  But I am going to push myself to write, because, as I have decided, I must write every day (emails don't count). Today we will say goodbye to Ireland, for the time being.  It has been a productive and successful if somewhat miserable trip, with rough living conditions, high energy costs, usually nowhere warm and clean to sit, no simple way to exercise, and a lot of illness.  I have to admit I am very, very happy to be out of here soon.  This afternoon we will fly to Turkey, spend the night in a hotel near the Istanbul airport, have a day in Turkey, and fly the next evening to the Balkans.  By Sunday evening we will be at home at last.  In our own home, where we can turn on the heat when we need to without qualms, wake up to a clean kitchen every morning if we want to, walk a few minutes down the street any time we need meat or vegetables, and have a distraction free (...

Hello again, imaginary or future reader. In my last post, I wrote “I decided to use much of this ‘extra’ time to rearrange myself and reorganize myself into what I have been wanting to do for so many years: writing.” I realized I felt I was being somewhat mysterious about what that means.  Perhaps it is obvious.  Perhaps some will make fun of me for elucidating what I am going to elucidate below. I don’t care. This is my safe space, haha.  This is where I practice writing. This is where I write the way I feel like writing. So, what did I mean by “rearranging myself and reorganizing myself into writing?” Well, for the most part, this means that I reorganized my digital life where writing is concerned.  I also set a schedule, and threw in a couple of New Years resolutions. First the digital part, and the schedule: I found, on my computer, my folders with incomplete stories, short stories, and writing notes, and got those organized and easily accessible through my deskt...

When I was 8 years old, I attended a summer camp in Vermont. It was a typical camp, I believe, and there were classes for sailing, swimming , crafts, and whatnot. One of the classes offered was a class in Poetry . I recall sitting near a boulder covered in moss, on a hillside, with a camp counselor and a group of children, as we commenced to try our hands (or minds) at verse, for officially the first time (though my mother used to transcribe the songs I made up randomly at the age of 4 and this has also since been preserved as poetry). I recall looking at an oddly shaped cloud and composing one of my first official poems. And thus was launched my unofficially official decision or desire that “when I grew up I would become a writer.” The story of my life between then and now would fill many books, many of which will never be written, and I will spare this paragraph the trouble of even a minor digression into that subject, as it is not the point.  I sit here, many years later, having...