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
Did you ever notice there are no recipes for leftover chocolate? That’s because it doesn’t exist, at least not in my family. When Rich first started coming to our summer reunions, he showed up with a two-layer box of See’s Nuts & Chews for each of my sisters. “I’m not saying I can be bought,”…
Did I ever tell you about the night I was on my way to New York to be interviewed on national TV and managed to get myself locked inside a museum in Cleveland? This was back in the nineties, when I was living in Ohio and serving on the board of a minor downtown museum.…
Today is our 32nd wedding anniversary. Yes, Rich and I were married two days after Christmas, creating maximum inconvenience for family and friends, especially those arriving from out of town. Selfishly, we chose this awkward date to enable us to take two weeks off work for our Costa Rica honeymoon. And although we’d talked of…
Shortly after I broke my finger in the Peruvian Amazon Some years ago in Peru, Rich and I were paddling canoes in an obscure subsidiary of the Amazon (the river, of course, not the online retailer) when I broke my finger. I’d like to tell you I sustained the injury wresting with an alligator, fending…
With so many of you writing to ask me about the practicalities of living in Spain, I thought you might like to hear the story of my friend Sarah Gemba, who moved to Seville about the same time I did, following a very different trajectory. She arrived as a teenage student and is now the…
“So we’re going to take the train through the famous Chunnel at last,” I remarked rapturously. Rich and I had been talking about it for years — ever since the Chunnel opened in 1994, in fact — and last September, as part of a surprise birthday excursion, he arranged for us to take the 2.75-hour…
“Is a groveling email offering to pay damages enough?” I asked Rich the morning after the party. “Or do you think this requires www.FakeMyDeath.com?” “Let’s see how they respond to the email,” he said soothingly. “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.” It all started innocently enough when an American friend here in Seville…
One recent Sunday, Rich and I took a midday stroll out of Seville’s old centro into the more modern district of Nervion and chose, more or less at random, a bustling café-restaurant for lunch. Our waiter (who turned out to be the chef) leaned in confidentially and said, “I recommend the wild boar.” You don’t…
“Would you and Rich be interested in going on the test run for a new food tour a friend of mine is starting here in Seville?” an expat pal asked me a few years ago. Tough work, but somebody has to do it! “If it’ll help,” I replied graciously, thinking Hot damn! This is gonna…
Of all the stamps in my passport, the one that gives me most delight is the one for a country I’d never heard of till I got there, and that may or may not actually exist. Two years ago, Rich and I were wandering around Vilnius , Lithuania’s engaging capital, when we suddenly found ourselves…
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.
