The rank insignia of our commander, Will Ritcher. The German rank is “Ober Leutnant”.

As I wrote last week, I have been feeling really overwhelmed lately with the amount of work I’ve taken on recently. I’ve finally started getting paid gigs in graphic design, web design, writing, and photography, but they’re all coming at once!  On top of the paid work (which generally takes priority in my life), I have been trying to launch The Mongolian Experiment, make sure that DriftingFocus has good content, and make sure that Marc is fed and the house is clean.  As a result, I’ve been feeling a bit …

This shot is of the eaves underneath the roof of the Confucian academy (sort of a school for monks, historically) at the edge of the main town on Jindo, the rural island I used to live on in South Korea.  The building is at the foot of one of the mountains that the town is ringed by, and I discovered it while wandering randomly around town one day.  The painting is very typical of Joseon-era Korean architecture and can be seen on most religious buildings in Korea, but the intricacy …

While I was downloading the video from last weekend’s reenactment from my camera, I noticed that there was footage from a few other earlier events on there as well, including some video from the last time we drove Smutyanka, our Ural sidecar motorcycle.  We only drove her a couple miles, but it was the first time we had ever taken her on anything other than a 2-lane neighborhood street, so I took some video to give folks some perspective on what the view from a sidecar is like.  Enjoy!

An illustration from The Wonders of Speed by Ellison Hawks, 1924.

The reenactment this weekend was probably the most poorly implemented, disorganized, clusterfuck of a tactical event that I have ever attended.
Did I have fun?  Yes.  Could it have been better?  Double yes.  Since I seem to have a thing for bullet points, I’ll explain both in that form.
I’ll start with the good:

First of all, the event was held at the Newville Trench Site, which is kind of like being able to rent out a Hollywood movie set for your personal enjoyment. As I have mentioned before, the site is a …

This blog post is a response to comments on both my post “My Beef with Travel Bloggers” and Nomadic Chick’s recent response to that post, “Is Lifestyle Redesign Elitist?“:
One of the most common negative reactions to my blog post “My Beef with Travel/Lifestyle Bloggers” is folks saying “how can you expect someone to write about something they haven’t done themselves?”.  I have to admit, I’m always taken aback when people say this.
I think the people who ask this question may have not stopped to consider what they …

Well folks, Marc and I leave this afternoon for our reenactment up in Newville, Pennsylvania.  We’ll be portraying Cossacks, the Russians who fought *with* the German army in WWII.  I’ve been to Newville before, but I was on the Allied side of the trenches, so it should be interesting to see the field from the Axis perspective.  Marc will be bringing his Maxim machine gun, so I suspect I won’t be moving around very much since I’ll likely be the one manning it and it weighs over 200lbs.
The event will …

Marc got the job he wanted!
Marc applied for a job as an investigator for a company that contracts with the government to do their background investigations.  It’s something I think he will be good at, and something that he will enjoy.  Unfortunately, the job also required acquisition of a Top Secret-level clearance, which we were unsure of his ability to get due to his status as a US/French dual citizen.  In the end, he ended up having to give up his French citizenship, but he got the clearance and now …

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately, and it’s starting to show.  I feel like my to-do list has taken over my life, and I don’t like it.  I have taken on too many obligations, and I can’t give adequate attention to any of them, resulting in me running around like a headless chicken.  I’m doing a lot, but only accomplishing a little, and I’ve been feeling lately like my brain is full.  Here’s a few of the things that have been on my mind lately, in no particular order:

Finishing …

On Sunday I met Marc down in DC after he got off work. The weather was really great and I knew there would be a lot of folks down on the mall, and the light in late afternoon/early evening is exceptional for photography. We wandered around from about 3:30 to 5:30. Here’s some of what I got:

I took this photo while on a ferry from Thun, Switzerland, back to Interlaken, Switzerland, where I would then take a train to Lauterbrunnen, a bus to Stechelberg, and then a cable car to get back to my hostel in Gimmelwald (all for free, thanks to my expensive-but-well-worth-it Swiss Pass).  It was a gorgeous day, and the first sunny one we had had in a few weeks, so I had made the trek from my base in Gimmelwald down to Thun early in the morning to catch a parade of …

I have a busy month ahead of me for reenacting!  I have a reenactment every weekend for the next month, starting with a WWII private event this weekend up in Newville, Pennsylvania.
I am really, really looking forward to this event.  Why?  Because it’s at, to my knowledge, the only recreated WWI trench site in North America.  Reenactors have built almost three miles of trenches on a 500 acre patch of farmland in rural Pennsylvania over the years.  It has bunkers, machine gun ports, and even a shell hole pocked no-man’s …

A Mongolian family rides in a motorcyle and sidecar in the village of Moron in Mongolia. Photo by Michel Setboun.

Now that I have completed my first set of Mongol clothes, I have to get to work on the “accessories”.  My first project is going to be making a snuff bottle pouch, which I will use to hold my keys, wallet, and anything else important.  The bag itself is of very simple design, but they are almost universally very highly decorated with embroidery, which is not so simple.  I bought some wonderful silk embroidery thread in the very gaudy (but very accurately Mongol) colors of burnt umber, magenta, lime green, …

Last night was my second attendance at the DC Travel TweetUp.  Held in a different location every month, this time it was at The Big Hunt in Dupont Circle.  The event organizers, Stephanie of Twenty-Something Travel and Dave of GoBackpacking asked me to be the official photographer this time.  I’m still working on learning how to use my new flash, but I think they came out decently.  Enjoy!

Now that I have my computer back, I am finally catching up on all the work I missed during its absence.  One of the things I’ve had a chance to do is start going through the 681 photos I took at Washington DC’s Chinese New Year celebration.  There will be many more in a post later this weekend, but here’s one, taken post-festival, for now:

I also have a guest post (or guest-photo) up over at Twenty-Something Travel.  Go take a look.

I envy those of you whose backpacks can consist solely of a bathing suit, a couple t-shirts, a pair of shorts, and some flip flops.  Why?  Because my backpack usually has at least one heavy coat, sweaters, gloves, scarves, and often heavy, fur-lined boots.  This is because, for some masochistic reason, I prefer to travel in colder countries.
When I look at a globe, I feel strangely drawn to countries that happen to be in colder climates.  Switzerland, Russia, Mongolia, the Patagonia region of Argentina, Finland, Nepal, Canada.  I’ve never quite …

Okay folks, it’s blogroll trimming time!
I have decided that my blogroll sidebar widget is *way* too long, and that it’s time to do some trimming.  I’m going to have a “links” page that will have a more comprehensive list of links, but the blogroll you see in my sidebar will be considerably shorter, and will hopefully more accurately reflect the direction I want to go with this blog.
Unfortunately, this means that whole segments of my blogroll are going to disappear.  Expats, Education, Foreign Service Officers, Spirituality, and DC Area will …

I’ve decided to start a new feature here, which I will be calling the “Travel Tuesday Photo”, after the Twitter theme of similar name.  Every Tuesday I’ll be posting a photograph from my travels, with a short note about the photo and the story behind it.  My photography blog has been successful in its own right, but I want to make sure that photography is still a part of this blog as well.  I hope folks enjoy this, so here’s the first edition of Travel Tuesday Photos:

Me & The Jindo
When …