September 13th, 2011 | Stories & News, email, family, letter, personal, PNG, Thanksgiving
I was digging through my old papers trying to find an old chart of my various ancestors the other day…I didn’t find it, but I did find an old letter from Thanksgiving 1995 from our father, he’s a linguist so he loves getting into all kinds of ways of looking at language–even spell check programs. I had a good laugh reading it over, and thought I’d share 
–although I don’t know if it will make any sense if you don’t know the people it is talking about!
July 1st, 2011
As you guys know I grew up in Papua New Guinea, I loved growing up there, but I also loved leaving there in my early teens. PNG is no place for a woman, or a girl for that matter, and although I tend to idealize traditions and indigenous cultures quite a bit on this site, I know it isn't all admirab ...
May 27th, 2011
We are having mushroom weather here in Vancouver, BC. I can't see the mountains, the clouds are low and the rain is sporadic. We actually had a bit of a hard flurry for 20 minutes earlier, but for the past 4 days it has been a light drizzle on and off with clouds and an occasional patch of blue skys ...
April 22nd, 2011
I have mentioned my incredible, brilliant, creative and imaginative sister before in passing, but I haven't really expressed how much she means to me. My parents adopted two children from Vietnam when they were married there during the Vietnamese war. The eldest one was adopted when she was about 4 ...
March 23rd, 2011
I have a confession to make, I'm no patriot. In fact the very idea makes me nauseous. This is a post I have been thinking about writing for a long time now in the interest of transparency--but have been avoiding it as I know it will probably piss a lot of people off. To be honest I have a lot of co ...
November 16th, 2010
Many, many years ago, when I was about 18 months old, our family took a trip around the world to move to Mt. Hagen, Papua New Guinea. It was 1975, just after Australia had granted Papua New Guinea independence. Most of the government houses were empty since the Australian administrators had left, an ...
August 10th, 2010
This weekend I finally fulfilled a long-time dream and re-read The Cook by Harry Kressing. For anyone who loves cooking or who is interested in psychology and sinister plots, I highly recommend this book. For anyone who has worked in the service industry, catering for the excessively rich and snobby ...
July 27th, 2010
Ever since I can remember, I have enjoyed working with food. I believe this has to do with the amount of involvement I had with fresh local food, growing up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. The Mount Hagen market was filled with fantastic fruits and vegetables and the gardens around our home we ...
March 13th, 2010
Many years ago, when we were growing up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, we occasionally went on holiday to Madang, an incredibly beautiful coastal resort town in this (at that time) untouched, remote pacific island. It was a long trip on the Highlands Highway, which was a two lane dusty dirt r ...
