Sharing Circle
We're All In This Together

An American Ex-Pat in France: The After by Nicole Miller

Written on August 8, 2009 – 9:35 am by Charis

This is a guest post written by one of my favorite bloggers, Nicole Miller.  It is always interesting to read her thoughts and to see what her day-to-day life is like in France.  Thank you for sharing, Nicole. Enjoy!

The After

Living in a second language and a foreign culture is an endless approximation.  A mathematical formula I can’t quite get right, despite years of trying.  I have navigated, negotiated, and narrated my life through the structured flow chart of French, la forme, for the past 11 years.  Le fond, the depth – the guts – all of that remains American.

The good news is, on a daily basis, I fit in.  I am not identified on the street as American and my accent is rarely heard.  The bad (or is it?) news is, I am still foreign here, other.  There are moments, both for them and for me, when it is clear, on the surface at least, that we simply cannot understand each other, despite accurate syntax and appropriate vocabulary. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fabulous World Of Terry Pratchett

Written on July 17, 2009 – 3:01 pm by admin

For those who perhaps are not familiar with him, I just wanted to do my bit to make sure that the whole world learns about the venerable English author, Terry Pratchett. He’s one of the most prolific, talented, and astute observers of human behavior who is writing today. If you have anything approximating a sense of humor, you will find something to enjoy in his extensive catalog.

Initially made famous for his Discworld novels, which are set on a mythical yet suspiciously familiar disc-shaped world, Pratchett’s work has now in several instances been made into film. Some of you may have seen “Hogfather” which aired fairly recently on American cable television.  Unfortunately reading books has to a degree fallen out of fashion, and of course many people are so busy working three or four jobs to make ends meet, that collapsing in front of a television set is the best many of us can do after an eighteen hour day. Like just about every other instance you can think of, Pratchett’s books have a richness of detail that cannot possibly be translated to a movie… but they’ve certainly given it the old college try and not come up wanting. (The aforementioned Hogfather was incredibly nicely done…. how can you miss, when you cast David Jason? But I digress.) Read the rest of this entry »

Memories Of New Mexico

Written on July 17, 2009 – 2:38 pm by admin
Rancho de Chimayo

Rancho de Chimayo

Many years ago (1973 to be exact) I was temporarily living in the US with my parents while my father was working over here. I was 18 and we had the opportunity that summer to travel around a little. We were living in Oklahoma City at the time so our trip basically included exploring Texas and New Mexico. Although I enjoyed Texas it was New Mexico that really stuck in my mind as I think it did with all of us.

On one of those days around lunchtime we happened to chance upon a restaurant in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. We’d been taking back roads as they’re always more interesting than highways. We decided to stop for lunch. The name of the restaurant was the Rancho de Chimayo. The food was excellent and after lunch we went on our way.

I didn’t realize at the time that this would be the last family trip I would ever take with my father as I left home and married not much later and he died at the age of 50 not long after my first son was born. Read the rest of this entry »

Top 100 Horror Movies

Written on July 17, 2009 – 1:43 pm by admin

I thought I’d pass on my personal top 100 horror movies. Although I am sure you will find many that you already know and would expect to see I guarantee that you will find some that you have missed out on!

100. IT (1990, Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace)

99. The Beyond (1981, Directed by Lucio Fulci)

98. Cloverfield

97. Don’t Look Now (1973, Directed by Nocolas Roeg)

96. Night of the Creeps (1986, Written and Directed by Fred Dekker)

95. Dead Ringers (1988, Directed by David Cronenberg)

94. Return of the Living Dead (1985, Written & Directed by Dan O’Bannon)

93. Scream (1996, Directed by Wes Craven)

92. Final Destination (2000, Directed by James Wong)

91. Re-Animator (1985, Directed by Stuart Gordon) Read the rest of this entry »

Quotey Quotes

Written on July 16, 2009 – 12:58 pm by admin

We have a brand new web site called Quotey Quotes (www.quoteyquotes.com). We’ve been collectors of quotes for years and quite frankly got fed up with the quality of most sites out there. So we decided to start our own. We started about 4 weeks ago and there’s already 12000+ quotes by category and we’re working on a quotes by author section.

I wasn’t going to release information about Quotey Quotes just yet as I was deliberately not submitting it to the search engines until it was more advanced. Somehow though it ended up in Google despite this so please take a minute to go and check it out.

As I said, it’s still under construction but the categories section is pretty well advanced and  should still provide you with a good few quotes you may not have come across. Unlike most other quote web sites we will be continually adding new quotes. Most, if you notice, don’t bother. There’s a whole wealth of up to date quotes around but nobody seems to want to put the effort in to updating their web site. We’re not afraid of a little hard work so bookmark it when you get there. It’s going to be #1 by the time we’ve finished!

We’re Back!

Written on July 16, 2009 – 12:47 pm by admin

For those of you that have found us through a search engine link (we do occasionally get found lol) you might be wondering why you got a 404 error. Well… our server had a hard disk crash and unfortunately the back-up was corrupted so we have lost everything. Such is life. There’s no point in getting upset about it really is there?

Anyway, we are now back and we’ll be reposting as much material as we can. For those of you that previously registered with us as contributors I am afraid you will have to re-register. My apologies for the inconvenience.