Kim Packard's Blog
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Dec.23.2012
I recently had the pleasure of having lunch with a multicultural group of people who are not Asians although one person had lived in mainland China.
"Why don't the Japanese use knives?" asked one of the older women, which took me by surprise, as I tackled the cheese blintze, tuna salad and a quinoa...
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Dec.22.2012
So, it's time for me to go on a diet again, soon, this time of year.
Last year, I tried the paleolithic diet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet and the year before last it was Gandhi's diet. http://health.india.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi-diet/
What to try this year?
I asked a friend and...
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Dec.21.2012
Listen to the sweet sounds of a cello made from an oil can and pieces of wood thrown in the garbage; a saxophone made of spoons and buttons.
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=3704 Sent to me by a friend, bless her heart.
And I found more...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16090309...
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Dec.21.2012
When I was still a kindergartener, so four or five years old, my parents hired a new housekeeper who worked for us for the rest of my formative years. She was two years younger than my mom and my parents told me very firmly that she was the boss when they were away and I was to obey her as...
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Dec.20.2012
When I was around nine or ten years old, I got hooked on flowering plants after reading Frances Hodgeson Burnett's Secret Garden about a little English girl from India. For the next three years or so, I spent practically all my allowance on plants at a nursery next to the Shinanomachi train station...
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Dec.18.2012
Mental illness is fairly common according to Mayo Clinic. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/mental-illness/DS01104/DSECTION=risk-fa... One out of four or five people suffer from some form of mental illness at least once in their lifetime. This can take the form of depression, anxiety disorder...
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Dec.15.2012
Some sources say that 1 out of 88 children is autistic. http://www.cdc.gov/features/countingautism/ Autism spectrum disorders include Rett Syndrome and Fragile X Syndrome caused by genetic mutations, classic autism (nonverbal and nonengaging) as well as "high functioning autism" (likely to be above...
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Dec.10.2012
Today is Human Rights Day (!) and I was wondering what makes this day different from other days and went down the list of events that took place on this day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_10
Some of the things that popped out for me were the following:
1830 – Emily Dickinson, American poet...
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Dec.10.2012
The link at the bottom is for an e-book that will be free from 12/10 Pacific Standard Time through 12/12/12.
At the time I wrote this story, I was very interested in comparing world religions and fascinated by the idea of keeping kosher and how such a guideline for a diet had developed. Having...
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Dec.06.2012
I recognize and understand spirituality more easily in the context of traditional religious rituals or the quasi-solitary contemplation of Nature or fine art, as opposed to more secular pratices such as yoga (as exercise) and tea ceremony which I view mainly as an aesthetic experience.
So when a...
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Dec.03.2012
I've been thinking about one of my favorite literary characters, the Cheshire Cat.
It is the marginal character who is an insider and an outsider at the same time. It understands how Wonderland works which makes it seem highly likely to be the alter ego of the writer. It makes predictions like a...
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Dec.02.2012
I had the pleasure of meeting someone, an American, yesterday who likes studying languages and had twenty years of editorial work experience (mostly in-house for a company but also some dissertations) and she told me that even Oxford University Press outsources editorial services and that...
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Dec.01.2012
Now that NaNoWriMo 2012 is officially over, I've come to realize that I have a method for writing when I write day after day.
I wrote on the average 1600 words per day for the first five days, then took a day off. Three more days of writing, then another day off. Altogether, I took four days off,...
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Nov.29.2012
So, I have gone off and done this terrible thing of writing my first 51,456 word long draft of fiction on command, i.e. within 30 days. I loved the experience of writing a novel in the cloud using Yarny.com and seeing those bars line up in a bar graph and show me how I write from day to day in...
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Nov.22.2012
Here below is a poem I like by Elizabeth Spires which seemed appropriate for the closing of this Thanksgiving Day.
Pome
By Elizabeth Spires
From flowering gnarled trees they come, weighing down the branches, dropping with a soft sound onto the loamy ground. Falling and fallen. That’s a...
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"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." Madeleine L'Engle”
About Kim
Kim Packard has self-published four distinct works, three books in English and a translation of one of her own books into Japanese, writing under the pen name of Uguïsse, derived from the songbird 'uguisu', known in English-speaking countries as Japanese bush...
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Kim’s Favorite Books
"Autobiography" by John Cowper Powys, "The Ten Foot Square Hut" by Kamo no Chomei,
"Kusamakura" by Natsume Soseki, "The Plague" by Albert Camus, "The Bridge...
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