Well Big D and I are heading to Ireland today (4/30). From Ireland we go to Lithuania. Yes! It is work. But such nice work. We get to see IICS professors. There’s Olga Artamonva teaching Russian at Trinity College in Dublin; she’s an absolute sweetheart. We’ve got Frank Peters and his amazing family living in [...]

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Pursuing beauty in our nation has become an expensive and somewhat obsessive pastime! Last year Americans (both men and women) spent $10 billion on cosmetics and beauty aids. (Compare that to $956 million back in 1996—a bit of an increase). Also in 2008, 10 million US citizens had elective cosmetic surgery. Of that number, 1 [...]

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Easter, in my opinion, is the most important holiday of the year. The most important holiday ever! This is the time that we acknowledge the life-giving death and resurrection of Jesus. Christmas is great. I love Thanksgiving. But Easter is the big one. Easter is the essential holiday! There are two specific events in the [...]

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The Trans-Siberian Railroad runs east and west/west and east across Russia. It’s the longest railroad in the world. It starts in Beijing or in Moscow—depending on which way you’re heading. It’s been running full steam (sorry) since 1916. Depending on who you talk to it takes anywhere from eight to twelve days to go from [...]

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“Monkeys will fly out my nose before I go there!” I was very serious and very firm with Daryl. He’d made an agreement with UNESCO and Afghanistan’s Ministry of Higher Education that he’d bring a team of academics to Kabul for university faculty training by March 2003. “You know I can’t go to a Muslim [...]

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I was a big, dumb, white girl from Kansas living in a city of 1.5 million Chinesers. In fact, in the fall of 1983, there were only about 15 foreigners total in our newly opened city of Changchun. I was there with two other women and we were the first Americans to teach at the [...]

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I have a terrible habit of arriving early. I guess it comes from overcompensating for the many years I was habitually late to everything. Once I got my life right with God, I decided being on time was evidence that I had truly changed. Well, then that “change” turned into obsessiveness. It drives my husband [...]

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You can’t blame me! You see I was raised in a very fundamentalist home. We didn’t have priests. So when Little Olga (see Is There Life in Outer Space? February 11th) and Svetlana asked to be baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church I struggled. When they asked me to be their godmother and stand with [...]

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