My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
A dog and a man walk into a bar. Bartender says, “You can’t bring animals in here.” The man says, “But he’s no ordinary dog. He talks.” The man turns to his dog and says, “What’s on top of a house?” The dog says, “Roof!” The man says, “What’s on the outside of a tree?”…
Just when I though travel couldn’t get any weirder, I learned the Japanese built a train platform in the middle of nowhere with no entrance or exit , no amenities, and no grand vistas. Obviously, you’ll be asking “Why?” And, “No really, why?” And finally, “Is this a joke or some kind of esoteric performance…
“Have you seen the ads for Toad Jam?” Rich asked excitedly. “It looks great!” For one hideous moment I thought he was talking about some sort of marmalade made with mashed-up amphibious creatures, and I felt I had to draw the line. Oh sure, I’d eaten frogs legs a few times, and once fried flies…
“Am I hallucinating,” Rich asked, “or is that man vacuuming his lawn?” I looked over and, yes, there was a guy standing on the live grass using a shop vacuum, the kind Rich keeps by his workbench to clean up wood shavings and such. Later, an online search revealed you can now buy dozens of…
Just before leaving Seville, I awoke to find the sky yellow and the city coated with muddy sand blowing up from the Sahara desert. Spain was in the grip of a sirocco, the gritty wind that can last weeks and is said to make everyone irritable and drive some to madness and mayhem. In olden…
“I saw a bank that said ‘24-Hour Banking,’ but I don’t have that much time,” comedian Steven Wright once joked. Ha! To hardened veterans of the Spanish banking system like us, 24 hours sounds laughably swift. Rich and I have been trying to untangle an issue with our Seville bank for over a year, and…
I love the Spanish news. No matter what else is going on in the world, they find time for articles like the one about 600,000 grumpy pensioners protesting under the slogan “ I’m old, NOT an idiot. ” Enraged by the endless closing of bank branches where human-to-human transactions occur, members of “the third age,”…
If I was wrongfully burned as a witch, and then 500 years later someone named a street after me in a fit of remorse, would I feel the scales of justice had finally been balanced? Not even close. As paltry as the apology may be, I give Seville credit for joining other Spanish cities in…
So I walked into the living room the other day and found Rich staring out the window at a pigeon. The bird — a lone male — was standing on the church roof just opposite, his feathers spread in full mating display, his head tilted to one side directing a come-hither look at my husband.…
When I read that a Catholic priest was using a squirt gun full of holy water to bless his parishioners’ Easter baskets while social distancing, I realized it was time to embrace the wacky side of the new dystopian order. This was in a suburb of Detroit back in April of 2020, and when Father…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
