OK, I’ll Jump in the Pool — Thoughts on Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan, as you likely know, is the mother of a child killed in the Iraq war, who has set up a campsite outside of George Bush’s Texas ranch in order to get a meeting with him. This is a serious post mostly, but I have to begin by saying that whenever I read anything about this subject, I never see “Cindy Sheehan,” I always see “Cindy Crawford.” No doubt […]

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Can Diet Pepsi Kill You?

During lunch today my co-workers were making critical comments about one of my few remaining vices, Diet Pepsi. Other than the cost, I don’t see that Diet Pepsi can do much harm (even though some scary web sites, including the very subtilely named aspartamekills.com, talk about brain tumors, vision problems, birth defects, hairy palms [no, I just made that up], and the fact that “Michael J. Fox, who was spokesperson […]

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Le Passe-Muraille

Following up on the strange statute (sort of) that we saw in Montmartre, of the man coming half-out of a wall: We visited my father-in-law in Berkeley last weekend, and he had managed to find a book of short stories containing the story of the man who could walk through walls (Le Passe-Muraille). It’s fairly short (14 pages) and he says that it is easy enough that Suzie and I […]

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The Blog Must Go On — What Would You Like to See?

The trip to Paris is over. But the blog must go on! There are a ton of things to blog about, some of which are more dicey than others. But before I start posting willy-nilly, I would ask my small (but I hope growing) readership what they would be interested in reading. Some ideas: Nuggets from the Net: While I could never hope to duplicate the excellent web site Metafilter […]

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The Jet Lag Diet — A Success

Before the trip to Paris, Suzie and I both tried the Jet Lag Diet, which involves alternate days of “feasting” and “fasting” and timing the intake of protein and carbohydrates so as to effect a “reset” of the body’s clock to the time zone to which you are travelling. As noted here, the fast days are pretty brutal, but one of us (Steve) had great success with the diet … […]

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A Cow-Lossal Welcome Back

My co-workers, apparently in sympathy with the evil bovines of Flaxweiler (and also apparently having excess time on their hands), went over the top (as sometimes is their wont) and decorated my office in a cow theme. So upon my return, I found, among other things, cow prints, cow paintings, cow statutes, cow wire sculptures, cow stickers, cow posters, pictures of cows pasted over pictures of my childrens’ heads, changed […]

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Jet-Lagged Reflections

We got our dog Elsie back today (thank you Tina) and tomorrow begins a new workweek, so this seemed an appropriate time for a final post on the France trip (but you never know). *** I was constantly struck at how comfortable I felt in Paris and France, and I’ve come up with several possible reasons why that was so. The first and most obvious is the climate, vegetation, and […]

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Back in Sonoma County, But Dreaming in French

We are back, after (once again, thankfully) an uneventful trip. We got back home about 9 pm, which means that we were up for 25 hours straight (less the fitful 1.5 hours of “sleep” I got on the flight from Paris to Cincinnati). I am planning to post later today, but wanted to share the fact that Suzie told me that a couple of times last night, I was talking […]

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Suzie’s Only Post

I think that I have enjoyed the blog as much as anybody. I’ve been in the posts, suggested photo selections for the posts and marveled at Steve’s amazing ability to turn a phrase. He has made this vacation more enjoyable for those of us on it and for all our friends who have lived vicariously through the blog. But since this is our last night in Paris, I thought I […]

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