The Vernon Journal

It’s a quiet morning in the village (except for little Mi-Yo making her presence known to the world by using our bamboo platform as a trampoline). We are waiting for an Akha Foursquare friend of ours to come visit. In the relatively peaceful morning I caught up on some tech news and found an amazing [...]

I just put O-Zone’s Dragostea Din Tei on my cellphone. In the past I haven’t been too particular about ringtones; if it let me know my phone was ringing, it was good enough for me. But this song has changed everything! Everytime my phone rings, I just want to dance! I’m even in danger of [...]

Since we’ve gotten to the field, I’ve become one of those people that devours books, especially what Paul and I call “candy books” or books that are just for fun. Lately I’ve been reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series, by Douglas Adams. It originally started out as a British radio comedy program in [...]

I’m always whining about how difficult it is to learn a tonal language, especially a tribal one without classes, books or cds. (See, don’t you feel sorry for me?!) Tonal languages are notoriously difficult to learn for ….well, anyone who’s native language is not tonal. Anyway, my last post reminded me about another funny language [...]

In my recent desperation to overcome a serious case of writer’s block, I did a google search on “tips for writing”. Somewhere amidst the flurry of clicks, I ran across this silly page about How to Write Good. While it didn’t automatically cure my writer’s block, it did give me a needed break from the [...]