This past week I've had a few brown days -- not the blues-- not too terribly sad, but brown. A friend once met an ex -boyfriend of mine and later when I asked for her impression of him, she described him as "brown" -- meaning his aura was brown. I knew exactly what she meant.…

Sunday was cold and wet, with languid flakes of icy snow/slush coming down. Mac left the apartment around 9 am to bike around the lake and I procrastinated, checking e-mail, doing dishes, etc. Finally got my butt out the door and slogged a 6 mile run, and when I got back a little before noon,…

We are staying in an apartment building smack dab in the middle of the nerve center of Zug. I could throw a ball from the 4th floor terrace and hit the train station. You can hear the trains come and go, but it's a fast whooshing sound, not too terrible. I love to stand at the…

Naturally, travel is all about identity - what we call ourselves - our "tag". We carry our labels around to define ourselves in strange lands. They are shorthand tickets for understanding us. In the U.S. we are generally labeled based on work, how we make an income. This is problematic for me. I don't have…

Off piste: backcountry skiing on un-groomed and unmarked slopes or pistes, including unmonitored and often out-of-bounds areas.  Lewis's week here with us went by so fast. Mac was in Rome the first several days, so it was just the two of us, finding our way in these early days in a new country. One morning…

"A journey is like marriage.  The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."   John Steinbeck So, let's get this out of the way, from the start. I have Bipolar 2. So I am high maintenance. And not in that makeup, hair, appearance way. More in that "highly sensitive" way, that…