Dead of Winter

If one aspect of a long winter doesn’t get to me, another will. That’s just the way it is. Right now my problem is the eighth, ninth, maybe the tenth consecutive day without blue sky.* For those who don’t experience real winter year after year, there is an assumption...

Dunedin Has Penguins

I am sitting in a coffee shop feeling both queasy and sad. The queasiness is because I pulled an all-nighter for the first time in thirty years. I drove Clare to Madison at 2am to catch a 6am plane to Taiwan. Taipei is the first leg of her adventure that will...

Kinmen Part Six: Epilogue

I’d planned for the previous blog to be my last about Kinmen, but I then felt that I had not brought the story to a satisfying close. The anecdotes that I described in the previous five entries were all from a trip taken over twenty-five years ago. I returned to...

Kinmen Part Five: “They are a local delicacy.”

One of the most memorable anecdotes from my 1993 trip to Kinmen was lunch of our second day. Members of our party were the guests of the chief administrator of Lesser Kinmen, the smaller of the two inhabited islands of the Kinmen group. Even though it is only a...
Steven Simpson