Prego!

    I’m stumbling and tripping my way through an attempt to learn Italian. It’s HARD! And I’m sure that Italian is one of the easier languages to learn—a romance language, lots of words are basically the same in English, plus I was reasonably good in French in high school and college. But I think…

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International touristing during a pandemic: Getting There.

  Peter and I went to London for 6 weeks a couple months ago. I wrote short weekly notes home to friends and family. Now we’re home, but the trip remains a happy memory. Here are some of the highlights. The trip itself was full of surprises. Doing the online forms for the Passenger Locater…

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Protest: Still on Trial

  It’s been a bittersweet time for those of us who were active in the civil rights movement (that’s what we called it then–today it’s the anti-racist movement; a much clearer descriptor of the struggle and the goal) and the antiwar movement in the 1960s. On the one hand, it’s terrible that in spite of…

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What to do now

    Here are some photos of flyers that I saw this morning on poles around our neighborhood–there was one other that didn’t photograph well, but was a great listing of black-owned businesses to support.   We do what we can and these are ideas for thing to do if you don’t want to mix…

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Been Traveling

Been traveling. South America is pretty much a mystery to me. We’ve traveled very little here, don’t speak Spanish, and are woefully ignorant about its land or its people. Although we have been to Machu Picchu and the surrounding Sacred Valley—all amazing, but another story—that’s just a tiny slice of our southern neighbors’ continent. Peter…

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Parochial: “limited or narrow outlook”

One of the interesting aspects of traveling outside the US is to look at our country from a distance, through others’ eyes. Here is a thought-provoking example from London written by Terry Eagleton in his review of two books, The Madness of Crowds and The Problem of Everything.  “Because the US is a deeply parochial society, not much…

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My Uncle Phil

My mother had one brother, Philip. Earlier this year, I traveled kitty-corner across the country to sit in a hard plastic folding chair on a jetty at Cape Canaveral Florida staring 14 miles north toward the Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad 39A for five and a half hours. Why? Because a tiny capsule containing a…

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North to Alaska!

Just back from a couple weeks in Alaska, partly by land and partly by sea, traveling with good friends. A first time for all of us, and not really high on our lists of places to visit. But why not, we thought; let’s go see. We started with a flight from Seattle to Fairbanks and…

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Protest by any other name…

In Protest on Trial I use the words “protest,” “dissent” and “activism” mostly interchangeably. “Resistance” is another word you frequently see in the context of people voicing concern or opposition to the status quo as orchestrated by governments, religions or corporations. One of the good things about the variety of wording is that it allows for a…

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Seattle Times covers Protest on Trial

Want to read a chapter of Protest on Trial? The Seattle Times Pacific Northwest Magazine for this weekend, May 5-6 excerpts a chapter of the book, and includes additional material from Kit. The photos are terrific! it’s great online, but the hard copy is even better. Seattle Times on Protest on Trial

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