Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

Belated props to my home state for kicking off the presidential race…

I found this image at the Etch-A-Sketchist, a site mentioned somewhat randomly at the end of the NYT piece on Scrivener.  And then there’s Etched in Time, a site that shows off the work of a young man who apparently sold his soul to […]

Happy new year!  I hope everyone’s 2008 is off to a great start.
I went to bed early last night at the lame hour of 10:45 PM, but was woken up by fireworks at midnight.  All I had to do to watch them was lean forward in bed and look out the window, which was pretty […]

Last night my friend Karen flew in from Afghanistan with her friend James for the beginning of two weeks of R & R that will take them to Israel and then back to Turkey for several days before returning to Kabul.  Some of you may be reading Karen’s blog (I mentioned it a few months […]

I was on top of the world for about 5 minutes tonight when I successfully replaced the defective hard drive in my wife’s iPod mini with a 2GB compact flash memory card, which I learned how to do by following directions in this article:  Turn your iPod mini into a flash-based iPod.
The process is very […]

I’ve never been one for fortune-telling, but I’m scratching my head after I learned about an odd experience my mother-in-law had recently.
Every now and then she’ll have coffee with a neighbor, I’ll call her Fatma, who is known to be skilled at telling people’s fortunes by looking at the coffee grounds left in their […]

A Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers!
This is my first Thanksgiving in Turkey since 2002 and, unfortunately, it passed like any other day.  I applied for permission to use the Ottoman archives in Sultanahmet and then spent a few hours over at the offices of the Istanbul mufti observing a sermon selection meeting and […]

I’m back in Istanbul now after a great trip to the States.  Here are some highlights:

I had a wonderful time in Brooklyn catching up with my old friend Josh (we first met in elementary school).  He’s doing really interesting work managing curriculum and personnel at a new school in the Bronx.
I hung out in Manhattan […]