Before my husband and I returned to the US after living in Mexico from 2005 to 2010, we also gave thought to moving to Uruguay. Expat living there had appeal for several reasons, but home won out. Still, I’ve maintained a curiosity about a country that is unusually welcoming to Americans who want to live there. So when our good friend Peter Rice emailed me last week that he and his wife were in Uruguay, I asked him for a blog post. He obliged, and here it is. Peter is about half my age, so he didn’t write about Uruguay … Continue reading →

Recently I’ve been wandering through the streets of New York City, thanks to a remarkable website called I’m Just Walkin’. A fellow named Matt, who previously walked across the U.S., is now walking in New York, and as he says on the site, “By the time I finish walking every block of every street in all five boroughs, I’ll have traveled more than 8000 miles on foot — all within a single city.” The site is in the form of a blog, and with monthly calendars you can see which days he has walked. He generally posts several photos on … Continue reading →

My husband Kelly and I just spent the weekend at a lovely retreat facility in the redwoods, not far south of San Francisco. We were at Bonfire Heights, a fascinating, delightful, disturbing, and utterly worthwhile conference. Speakers and workshops covered a very wide range of topics, and I found it refreshing to get my brain into some new grooves. The first presentation was a celebration of nerds, put on by Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, a woman whose parents came here from India with her when she was a child. She’s a nerd despite being quite stylish, and she was interested when Kelly … Continue reading →

When I was in college, I spent a summer on a work camp in Moyamba, Sierra Leone. It was through a program called Crossroads Africa. About a dozen American and Canadian college students joined forces with young Africans to start construction on a high school. As we worked together, we shared stories of our lives. I remember how joyous the young Africans were. I loved dancing on the weekends, at large get-togethers with everyone from toddlers to grandparents dancing together. As a result of that experience, I went to graduate school in applied anthropology, hoping to make a difference in … Continue reading →

How cool would it be to build your own solar car? That’s what my husband Kelly Hart thought, over ten years ago. He was following all the solar car news, and he noticed that all the attention seemed to be going into racing vehicles. He thought a slower moving, reliable neighborhood vehicle would be very useful. So he built one, with some help from me, and we called it our Sunmobile. We used it to drive around our small Colorado town. We even took it in the 4th of July parade one year! How did we create this unusual thing? … Continue reading →

Several years ago, Kelly built a solar car and we used it quite a lot. When we left Colorado, we included the car in the deal when we sold our house to friends. It needed some repairs, and I’m not sure if it’s back on the road or not. It didn’t need license plates or any paperwork. You can see details about it and photos on the small website Kelly has: www.sunvee.com By a solar car, I mean one that runs completely on solar power, with no electricity from the grid. Updated: Tuesday, November 24, 2015