Entries Tagged 'Personal' ↓

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 [...]

Last night I took an overnight bus to Izmir (in a suit and tie, no less) to observe a sermon committee meeting today.  I’ve interviewed the mufti and after lunch will be back for the meeting.  Tonight I fly back to Istanbul in order to make my Wednesday flight to the U.S. 
 Everything’s on track, but [...]

I’ve been working more, and more consistently, than at any period in my life.  I know because I’m still keeping the time logs to prove it.
Unfortunately this has meant less time for blogging, which I’ve missed.  On the other hand, I’ve found that after a day or two of not checking my RSS feeds I [...]