http://ldworldwide.com Repatriation, etc. Tue, 07 Sep 2010 13:19:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Although school started two weeks ago, this is the day that life finally resumes in earnest. I am glad that my regular thought-leader, Andrew Sullivan, has returned to his blogging post (the entries of his early-career underlings were boring me). I look forward to thicker magazines and newspapers, with the ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1313 Supervised by the BFF last night, while Big D and I walked down the hill to a newly opened “bistro,” my children made me a birthday cake. Unable to locate candles, they instead came up with idea to place little pictures attached to toothpicks on the cake. The ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1312 If I think about it, a few of them stand out. When I was eight, there was some sort of picnic celebration on a beautiful evening in the newly emerging planned community of Columbia, Maryland, where my widowed grandmother had recently taken up residence. I also recall a picture from the ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1311 But I am a little bit thrilled, nonetheless! My oft-cited favorite blog, Andrew Sullivan, runs a regular contest called “View From Your Window.” Readers submit pictures taken from a window, and, once a week, he invites his other readers to guess the location. This week, I entered for the first ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1310 One’s first baby results in a long series of shocks, not the least of which is the remarkably ungenerous system of parental leave in the United States. Only since Bill Clinton have new parents even received three months off of work for a new baby during which they cannot lose ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1309 Sigh. Must you, CIA, must you pay bribes to officials within Afghanistan’s central government, for the purpose of generating the information you think you need? Is there no thought given to the long-term harm of American cynicism and hypocrisy when it comes to supporting a straight, viable alternative to the ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1308 To celebrate resumption of life as I like it — girls at school, me working until they get home — I attended a forum on economic development in the city of Durham yesterday. This was a bit of self-sponsored continuing education: I wanted to observe how one locality in the ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1307 School started on Wednesday in the joint Chapel Hill-Carrboro school district. It comes with a new routine and a new cast of characters. I am also looking forward to some new challenges, including finishing a paper with one client and working in Africa with another. For his part, the Big ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1306 We have had 1000 wonderful experiences. Isn’t it time for school to start, already? http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1305 Last weekend, while driving Evie to camp in West Virginia, our GPS helpfully put us on a six-mile dirt road, ostensibly to save us 10 minutes on the trip. The primitive road spit us out in a place — a retreat, of sorts — that looked very familiar to ... http://ldworldwide.com/?p=1304