I sneaked out of my Riedlingen apartment shortly before 5 am on Tuesday morning and thought to myself, “I smell a skunk.”  Now, in North America, that wouldn’t be anything unusual, but I actually don’t remember ever smelling a skunk in Germany.  I dragged my bags up the stairs to my car and noticed what […]

(Reading on Facebook?  Please click on the “View original post” link above.  Seriously!) “Why are you still here?” a student asked this afternoon.  He wasn’t referring to my imminent departure or to the fact that I was still at school, cleaning out my office, long after I’ve usually gone home.  In the course of a […]

(Facebook readers:  click on the “View original post” link above to see this entry as it ought to look…please.) Picture this:  [okay, maybe don’t picture it—don’t want to cause any retinal damage—but at least imagine the context] a quadragenarian woman, all decked out in slimming (ha) black sweats and three gallons of sun block, heads […]

(Reading on Facebook?  Please click the “View original post” link above to see this entry and its pictures as they ought to look!) There are milestones that are hard to ignore.  Some of them come but once in a lifetime, and others, especially in a place like BFA, are cyclical.  Junior-Senior Banquet belongs in the […]

Three weeks from today, I will be on a plane to the US, having said the kind of goodbyes that should never come early but, in this case, must. I’ve always considered imminent goodbyes as platforms for evaluations, and as these final days of the year tick to a close, I wonder about a lot […]

(If you’re reading on Facebook, please click on the “View Original Post” link above.  This one won’t make any sense unless you do!) [I must preface this post by informing my loyal readership that I did not write it!  Tonight was another evening of POT (Phi-Phi’s On Thursdays) mayhem and fun, and, as always, both […]

(Reading on Facebook?  Do yourself a favor and click on the “View Original Post” link above.  The pictures will look vastly better on Xanga!) If there’s one thing we know to be true at BFA, it’s that the spring term requires boat-loads of tenacity!  I’ve seldom seen a more apt illustration of the word than […]

(Reading on Facebook?  Please, please click the following link to be taken to my website.  It’ll only take a second, and the improved appearance will make it worth your while…) I’ve always been a fan of pop-ups.  One of my favorite cards ever was a birthday greeting I received from a friend in college that […]

(Reading on Facebook?  Please click this link to access the blog and see the pictures and layout as they OUGHT to look!  https://www.xanga.com/serenitymine) They’re back…  They came crashing back into town today, after two weeks of spring break, with all the subtlety of stampeding…well…teenagers. Squirt and Erin didn’t waste any time calling me up for […]

I picked up the phone and said “Hello?” “So what do you do if you have three breasts—three chicken breasts—and they’re all stuck together?” Under normal circumstances, I might have quickly discerned the identity of the caller and the nature of the call, but I had been awakened mighty early this morning by yet another […]