Apologies to those of you who have seen this, but I just read about the growing number of Complaints Choirs worldwide, which are just what they sound like, choirs which sing a litany of complaints set to music. The genesis of the idea came from two Helsinki artists who were inspired by the Finnish expression […]

I can’t say exactly when it was I decided that if I got married I wouldn’t change my last name, but I know that by the time I got to college the idea was pretty much confirmed in my mind. I knew a lot of people at that time who were finding creative ways to […]

Even though we’d figured out how to get “regular” telephone service in France before we left (see Taking our phone service with us (or not)), we knew we’d both also want cell phone service. We could have waited until we got here to figure it out, but we weren’t confident enough in our French to […]

It’s amazing sometimes how a small thing can turn into a big thing when there is a language barrier to navigate. Case in point: last week Joe and I went into a small grocery store we’d never been in before, and all went smoothly until we got up to the checkout. The cashier was ringing […]

Several months before our move, we started thinking about how we’d make and receive phone calls with people back in North America. Our presumption was that we’d have both a landline and cell phones, but that using either one to make calls to North America on a regular basis would be prohibitively expensive. (It turns […]