Siobhan McDonough, Writer
As a mark of my one year anniversary in Zambia, here is a definitive ranking of vegetarian food on every airline I’ve traveled on on the past year (I have to travel on multiple airlines to go home). It heartens back to Spiders I Have Known, which is my 5th most-read blog post, thank you…
This section is reposts of my 15-part Morocco travel guide. They were originally published at Let’s Go, but have since been taken offline. They’re definitely musings of an overexcitable 20-year-old, but I’m reposting them because they’re sometimes funny and contain a lot of useful information. I’ve often wanted to direct people towards them when they…
I recently read a paean to the character of great cities in the United States. New York is obsessed with wealth and knowing people; Los Angeles with fame, San Francisco with technology, starting the next big thing. Boston/Cambridge is obsessed with ideas, education, and intellect. It is the author’s favourite city, and mine. It reminded…
Life update from a sleepy city… Car After a hiatus of over a month, April the March is back and whole again! It (she? it?) was in bureaucratic limbo for three weeks. When it came back, its homecoming was short-lived. It needed to be jumped twice, stalled while driving, and was having other electrical…
The week is almost over! Here are some interesting things I’ve read recently about women and development (thanks to my friends and colleagues for finding them and letting me share). Cover photo of me, a woman, since I don’t like taking photos of random women (or anyone)… The transformative power of giving young women cash…
Last weekend I ran my first half marathon! We ran over Victoria Falls! It was awesome! I signed up for it and started training three weeks before it happened, so I was hilariously undertrained. I also got food poisoning and into a car accident two weeks before the race, so my longest long run ended…
Two weeks ago, I got in a car accident. It’s a weird, frightening, and kind of hilarious story that I’ll tell sometime far in the future. (Why are my best stories always ones that aren’t appropriate for public consumption?) Everyone was completely fine, except the cars. (Everyone was fine because everyone was wearing seatbelts! Please…
When I began this blog, I hoped to make interesting articles I’ve read a regular feature. Alas, nothing has been regular, and I’m backlogged about 9 months on thought-provoking articles. But I’m going to be trying to posting these things with minimal commentary, more often. Also, excuses to post unrelated photos as the cover images!…
(Longish note: I struggle with whether to include content warnings on my development posts. This post is largely about gun violence, including suicide. Suicide is something that can make me upset if I came across it unawares, so it’s something my instinctive reaction is to warn about. But for other people, other types of unpleasant…
6 book recommendations from this year so far: A Face Like Glass and The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge Wow. Recommended for anyone, except small children. Hardinge is perhaps the best children’s/young adult author I’ve ever read (there’s also Diana Wynne Jones. Tolkien if you put him in that category. Elizabeth Marie Pope if she’d written…