My dad, full of festive cheer, bought a singing Santa hat last year. Not only does it sing, it flips back and forth in time to the music. This is Santa Hat 2.0. The first one, bought many years ago, just flipped back and forth when you squeezed the bobble on the end. This one … Continue reading
Category Archives: Featured
Giving Thanks
I went home for Thanksgiving for the first time in five years. It was also the first time in about six or seven years that my mom’s whole side of the family had been together. There’s nothing in the world like that all-togetherness. I am so thankful for living abroad, but also for the freedom … Continue reading
Inventory
I recently finished reading Moab is my Washpot, Stephen Fry’s first memoir. I discovered that he too was the child of an inventor, though his dad invented very different types of stuff than mine. Also he describes a dad with a very different temperament than my own father. Nevertheless, his description of growing up in … Continue reading
Swimming Along
Oh yes indeed, Caitie has returned! I missed you, gentle readers, and I know many of you missed me. How lucky do I feel that a few of you even wrote in to express your consternation at my extended absence? Very lucky, that’s how. My disappearance was principally due to a most welcome new development … Continue reading
Raisingate
Take heed of the unremarked but insidious pestilence of raisins. They get into everything! Nobody else seems to be concerned about this. Personally, I have an abiding hatred of them. This may not seem at first glance to be an issue of pressing importance, but you have obviously never been in the same vicinity as … Continue reading
Reaping Midnight
Okay, it wasn’t actually midnight. More like 10:30. Poetic license; see my previous blog entry Midnight in the Fellows’ Garden, also Shakespeare (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, scene 1, Theseus, “The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve”, etc). I was walking home, at 10:30 as we have now established, and in the dark the lavender … Continue reading
Midnight in the Fellows’ Garden
I returned to England last Thursday after a visit home to see my uncle who was losing his life to pancreatic cancer. On Friday, shortly after I’d made it back to Exeter where I live, I got the call that he had died. The swiftness of his passing was a great shock to us all, and … Continue reading
Full of Wonders
I’m in the airport waiting for my flight back to Britain. I came back to America to visit my uncle with terminal cancer. I have a purple rubber Pancreatic Cancer Awareness band around my wrist. My mother and I drove back to Tampa together while my dad stayed up north with the rest of the family … Continue reading
Painted Women
I am absolutely in love with this new BBC series, “Desperate Romantics.” It’s about the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the Victorian period. It’s being told in the voice of Frederic George Stephens (Fred), a writer portrayed in the series as a moth to the dazzling personalities of the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman … Continue reading
In a Merry Hour: Caitlin E McDonald 