My slightly unusual T-day
I have quite a few, perhaps too many, good American friends in the UK. But the sad fact is that it was impossible for me to participate in any traditional Tofurkey day rituals. There are many reasons for this. One of my good American friends is back home in America for the week, for obvious reasons. Two of my good friends have babies less than six months old. Another (Kat from 3bedroombungalow) was celebrating, but inconveniently located over 20 miles away and NOT on a major train line. My living in an urban center and having no car makes this a bit tricky. Especially since I had to work straight through until after 5

Thanksgiving
This week Americans will mark Thanksgiving. I love Thanksgiving. I love it for many reasons. I love that it is a celebration, a big family holiday that involves a feast with no religious overtones. I think there should be more of these. Gatherings of friends. Opportunities to meet around a dinner table. Groups of people, larger than you would normally have at a dinner party if it wasn’t a holiday. I live in a tiny one-BR flat in the UK, so I’m a bit paralyzed when it comes to hosting a big T-day dinner. (Where T in my world stands for Tofurky, not turkey. Yeah, that does interfere with the whole turkey day thing a bit

Unexpected Celebrity Sighting
I was walking in an English town today, wearing jeans and a red hoodie and carrying a very large cup of Starbucks coffee (i.e. looking as much the hapless American as is humanly possible) when I saw something up ahead. A police motorcycle, blue lights flashing, was waiting in a zebra crossing. I looked up the road and saw more blue flashing lights. Several more police. They started moving towards me. Then a fancy black car. Funny, it had a flag on top. I peered in the large car window (not even frosted–perfectly clear) and saw an elderly couple sitting there in the back seat. She had on quite the outfit, a peach hat and matching jacket. No, it couldn’t be&

The blogosphere abuzz
Actually it was probably more the Twitterverse. Regardless, either way the breaking news earlier this week was that sex-blogger and author ‘Belle du Jour’ was a PhD scientist about my age. Not a professional writer. Suddenly the lines about how it was so well-written make sense–in this business, doing science or research is only a small piece of the pie, we have to communicate our results both in person and in print. So I’m not terribly surprised that she is an academic type in the sciences, we have to be able to construct sentences. Overall,

Guest post–The accidental expats
I have answered some questions about my strange expat life in an interview on ‘The Accidental Expats’ site. Please do go read the link and see some interesting factoids about how I ended up here as a stranger in a strange land! And note, thanks to Twitter I am finding intriguing expat blogs faster than I can add them to the listing, so please do not stop checking and please do remind me if you need to be added!