Janice Hamrick's Blog

I recently discovered Dracula Daily, a newsletter which sends you individual chapters from Dracula by Bram Stoker in “real time.” As you might remember, Dracula is written as a series of letters, journal entries, newspaper articles and so on, each dated between May 3 and November 10th. The newsletter sends each entry on the date shown.

Besides loving the sheer cleverness of this concept, I’m finding it a novel (hahahah!) way to read. Getting a small piece at a time slows me down, not jus...

In my last post, I mentioned that drawing makes me makes me much more observant. This charming pink house is on a narrow side street in Belem, Portugal, and when I saw it, I knew I wanted to draw it.

Every street in Portugal has lovely houses and building like this. Not all of them have the fabulous bougainvillea and adorable moped. I changed the colors a bit, because hey, art.

The post Drawing from Life appeared first on Janice Hamrick.

Hahahaha – see what I did with that title? No? Rats…

Sketchy art humor aside (hahahaha – I did it again!), drawing helps me look at the world more closely and in a different way. And please notice that I said “drawing”. Not “drawing well”. Not even “learning to draw”. Just drawing. When I see something unusual or beautiful or just interesting, I’ll think, “Could I draw it?” The answer, for me, is usually “absolutely not” or even just a mental snort. But whether I actually try or not, I’m obse...

There is a joy in deciding that time is your friend, in choosing deliberate stillness.

Realizing you will never be able to see everything you want to see is actually liberating.

When anyone, young or old, begins traveling, the instinctive urge is to make every moment count, to see as much as you possibly can, to voraciously experience everything. Fourteen countries in fifteen days. Grinding schedules to get from one destination to the next with maximum efficiency. Ticking off each vist...

The guards at Hadrian’s wall have changed a bit over the centuries…

Let me start by saying that Housesteads Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall is a truly impressive historical site, managed with great care and professionalism by the English Heritage charity, and is completely worth your time and effort to visit. I could go on about the many extraordinary features – the well-preserved walls and gates, the hospital, the hypocaust, the granary…but I won’t (you’re welcome). You can read about it elsewhere or you can visit. I highly recommend the latter.

No, this is abo...

Because this is a sophisticated, intellectual site, today’s topic is British toilets.

To start with, the variety of flushing mechanisms is astonishing. There are buttons on adjacent walls that require the finger strength of King Kong to adequately push. There are double buttons on top of the tank, one side for “number one” and the other side apparently for “elephant emission”. Neither are marked in any way. There are pull levers, pull chains, and (rarely) a push handle. Many are accompani...

Welcome to the new blog! A couple of years ago, having left my website fairly unattended, I was surprised and horrified to get a note from my host provider saying it looked like my blog had been hacked. This was puzzling – what did she mean it “looked like” I got hacked? Was there some doubt? Had a tasteless infomercial been subtly slipped in amongst my insightful and witty posts?

So I checked, and yes it DID appear as though I’d been hacked – every single word I’d written had been replaced w...

A slice, in the parlance of British restaurants and grocery stores, is a miniature lozenge-shaped pie made of flaky pastry wrapped around a savory creamy filling. They are delightful parcels of hot, filling goodness, convenient, cheap, and satisfying. Think chicken pot pie, but in a contained parcel you can hold in your hand.

Not to use a maul to hammer home the analogy, but I’m sort of shooting for this theme here. Miniature bits of goodness, maybe not nutritious, maybe not good for you...

I miss my friends.

I wont go into all the far more significant and terrifying aspects of this pandemic others are covering that and have far better thoughts to contribute.

But in the hope of helping others, even a tiny bit, I will post this to say that we tried a virtual happy hour tonight and it helped. A lot.

Before COVID-19, five of us met every two to three weeks just to catch up over a glass of wine and a few snacks. Those happy hours were (as Im learning about so many things) both...