07.14.10
Posted in Career, Family & Friends, Life, San Francisco, Travel at 11.47 am by Caitlin
June was completely hectic! We ended up moving house two days before I was flying out to New York City for the TBEX travel bloggers conference. Our new home is a two-bedroom unit in a block of four in one of the towns near Stanford University. It’s not quite as big or charming as our old house but it’s quite spacious and it has a little balcony. There’s a ton of cupboard space, an outdoor clothes line and a car port. We live on a quiet street, but close enough to the shops, and there’s a library and swimming pool nearby as well. We are not fully unpacked yet and we don’t have a phone or the internet at home yet, but we are starting to settle in.
The biggest advantage with the move is that my husband can walk or cycle to work rather than having a mammoth commute from the city. We are also saving a huge amount of money on rent. But there are a few other nice side-benefits as well. Firstly, the weather is so much better than in the city. San Francisco is infamous for being cold and foggy in summer but it’s very much a micro-climate and everywhere else in the Bay Area is warm and sunny at this time of year. Secondly, we are now only 10-20 minutes’ drive from great hikes in the state parks. If you look at the map of the Bay Area below, you can see that the peninsula is rimmed by green. Thirdly I didn’t have a pool near me in the city and since moving here I’ve been swimming a few times a week, which is something I really enjoy. There are tennis courts too but you need a key and I haven’t got myself organised yet, nor do I have a partner to play with.
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We have bought a car – a 2007 Prius and we got a great price for it. My husband bought it the day I was coming back from New York and came to pick me up from the airport. It’s amazing to me that we both went 33 years without a car or even a driving licence but within six months of moving to California we had our licences and within a year we had a car. The Prius is not the most exciting car in the world but the fuel efficiency is terrific (we’ve rented a few cars so we have a good basis for comparison) and because they are so common in the Bay Area, there are some good options on the second-hand market. It’s a lot newer than I expected that we would be able to afford, though there are also quite a few miles on the clock already. This area is great for walking or cycling (flat, unlike the city) and there’s a train up to San Francisco that takes 40 minutes to an hour, but it’s really great to have the freedom of a car and be able to get out to do hikes on the weekend.
I had a great time in New York, though it was unpleasantly hot and humid. I stayed with our friends Mike and Jessica in Brooklyn and met their gorgeous one-year-old daughter. I also stayed with a travel writing friend Wendy at her mother’s apartment in Midtown, in order to spread myself around a bit. I caught up with my friends Rema and Sheelagh and Alex and Kachina and their two-year-old son. TBEX itself was hectic with lots of late-night partying going on and it was really great to meet so many people that I’ve known online for so long. I have promised a lot of New York-related blog posts and so far I have this post on gorillas at Bronx Zoo and this video of a cool interactive art project involving street pianos.
Please subscribe to Roaming Tales or join the page on Facebook to keep up with the new posts. Among the upcoming posts, I have Cajun food in Staten Island, a behind-the-scenes tour of restoration efforts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a review of an Afghan restaurant in Manhattan.
If you are interested in my professional work, I have been writing a bit for The Australian lately. I had an article on electric cars in news today and a feature on stem cell research ethics in the health section late last month.
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05.24.10
Posted in Career, Life, San Francisco at 7.02 pm by Caitlin
We have loved living in San Francisco but all good things eventually come to an end. We have decided to leave the city and move down to the peninsula to be closer to my husband’s new job. We are looking at Palo Alto or Menlo Park, which are about 40 minutes drive from here when the traffic is good. Really in Sydney, you would still consider that part of the city, but here it is very much its own place.
I will miss our little home in Noe Valley. We have a super-cute cottage with a garden and view of the city, friendly neighbours, a rec centre with a tennis court nearby, lots of cafés and shops, and a tram line into town. San Francisco is not a big city but it’s interesting – there is always something going on. I’ve also got friends here – in the city and also in the East Bay. It’s started to feel like home.
Still there are advantages to the move. San Francisco is foggy and cold in summer but elsewhere in the Bay Area it is sunny and warm. I’m looking forward to that! We should get more for our money in terms of housing stock without being too suburban – the places we are looking are really more like little, upmarket towns than suburbs. Although I work from home, the location should be better for me in my coverage of the media and tech scene in Silicon Valley. We are planning to buy a car and this will also be good for my travel writing as it will make short trips out of town far more convenient and cost-effective. (We both got our driving licences earlier this year – I got mine about five weeks before my husband so I joke that I am the senior driver!)
We have let our landlord know and we need to get the house ready for tenancy viewings so that we can get it rented out and avoid any double rent. We have also started looking down south – we rented a car on Saturday and saw a few places and we plan to do this again this weekend. Hopefully we will find somewhere soon as I am going to New York in June and I would like to have everything in place before then. I dislike moving but I’ve done it enough times by now that I should be quite good at it! Wish us luck!
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05.09.10
Posted in Career, Media & Internet, Travel at 2.13 pm by Caitlin
I’ve been keeping my eye out for jobs but mostly been freelancing since moving to San Francisco. Here are a few of the things I’ve been up to on the work front.
LA Times | 2 May 2010: San Francisco: The rolling transit museum known as the F line
Travel article on San Francisco’s historic trams, which come from all around the world, including Melbourne.
Galavanting | 2 May 2010: Behind the Veil
Travel essay on spending a week living with an Iraqi family in Syria and my experience as a woman in this part of the world.
The Australian | 15 March 2010: Home invasion of 3D’s visual power
Feature for Media section on 3D television.
The Australian | 1 March 2010: Faceless no more – Facebook admits errors
Feature for Media section on Facebook’s response to cyber-vandalism of tribute sites for dead children.
New Statesman | 14 January 2010: Our friends electric
Article on renewable energy – wind, wave and tidal – in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. (I made a trip to Orkney to research this right before leaving Britain, in June 2009).
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05.16.09
Posted in Career, Life, Media & Internet at 4.05 pm by Caitlin
For those of you who don’t already know, we’re moving out of London. My husband was offered a transfer to San Francisco by his company. Basically we thought, ‘why ever not?’ It’s a great opportunity professionally, San Francisco sounds like a wonderful place to live, it’s a lot closer to our home town of Sydney, and in a recession it’s only prudent to follow the work.
My husband left for San Francisco yesterday and I am joining him as soon as I’ve packed up the house and cleared the paperwork with the US Embassy. I’m hoping to find a writing or editing job but I know that very few places are hiring right now, so I’m probably going to continue freelancing for a while.
In the mean time, I have an undefined period of time to say goodbye to London, and maybe take a trip to Wales and Scotland to see my family. It’s hard to be separated but I’m trying to stay cheerful and get through my to do list.
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02.09.09
Posted in Career, Life, Media & Internet, Travel at 12.22 am by Caitlin
I’ve applied for the Best Job in the World – please head over to Roaming Tales to read all about how you can help. Thank you!
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01.10.09
Posted in Career, Film, Life, London, Media & Internet, Travel, Writing at 3.13 pm by Caitlin
A snapshot of my life in January 2009.
- It’s really cold here in London right now – we’re apparently getting winds from the Arctic rather than the Gulf Stream. There’s often a dusting of snow on the trees and grass in the mornings, plus we’re getting heavy frosts. Apparently it got down to -12C this week. Today we’re expecting a maximum day temperature of zero celcius (32F) so it’s literally freezing. It’s meant to warm up a little next week though.
- Freelance work has slowed right down in the past few months so I’m pitching furiously trying to drum up more work. I’m certainly open to any ideas or offers so please keep me in mind if you know anyone who needs writing or editing work done. I’m still doing regular posts for EcoSalon, which I’m really enjoying. I also had a piece on music copyright published recently in The Observer – it was lead media feature in the Media & Business section – and a piece on podcast fiction in The Bookseller.
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The countdown to the wedding is on in earnest – the date is 4 April so it’s less than three months to the day. Yikes! We’ve booked the venues and the caterer and I’ve bought the dress. The dress fits now but I’m focusing really hard on healthy eating and exercise in the hope of shedding a few kilos and toning up so hopefully a few adjustments will be in order closer to the day. We’re hoping to get invitations out really soon.
- On that note, we are still madly researching honeymoon destinations. We want to stay close to Australia to cut down on flights because my cousin Rhia’s wedding is 15 days after ours in Queensland. We were looking at New Zealand at one point until we decided we wanted a tropical island. The problem is that April is the tail end of the rainy season in places like the Great Barrier Reef, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. We’re not really sure what that actually means – days of torrential rain and cyclones or just semi-regular showers to cool down an otherwise hot and sunny day?
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We went to see Changeling last weekend and I was really impressed. We had resisted seeing it to a large extent because it looked suspiciously like an Angelina Jolie Oscar vehicle. I guess it is to an extent but it’s also a really good movie. I’m a fan of Clint Eastwood as a director and he does a really good job with this movie. It’s tightly plotted, emotional but not contrived, and it’s a real testament to his directing talent that there are so many strong performances particularly from the child actors. It’s based on a true story and was quite a pivotal point in the development and reform of the Los Angeles police force so that was interesting too. Plus, there are some fab hats – not only the Jolie character’s 1920s cloches and 1930s wide-brimmed hats but also for the men and the journalists (can I have a hat with a ticket that says ‘press’ for the next press event I attend, please?).
- My blogs are in the running for a couple of awards and I would really love your help. Please consider nominating my travel site Roaming Tales for Best Travel Weblog in the 2009 Bloggies and the travelogue category of the Lonely Planet Travel Blogger Awards. Please also consider nominating The Gooseberry Fool for Best Food Weblog in the Bloggies. I would also be delighted if you would nominate either or both blogs for Best European Weblog or Best-Kept Secret Weblog or any other category that you think is appropriate. I think my chances are best with Roaming Tales so if you want to focus your fire on just one blog, that’s the one I would ask you to go for. It would mean a lot to me to have your support and if I have any degree of success, it could really boost my readership and help pay off my blogging efforts.
I haven’t actually nominated myself so I’m relying on friends, family and readers to do it for me – and apparently the more times I am nominated, the higher my chance of making the finals (it’s not based exclusively on votes – there is a panel of voters as well). The Bloggies have been running nine years and they’re quite well respected and prestigious but this is the first time they’ve had a travel category, so that’s quite exciting.
Please note, you can nominate as many times as you like in the Lonely Planet awards and you have until early February. However, you can only nominate once for the Bloggies and you only have until the end of Monday 12 January. Also with the Bloggies, you need to put at least three blogs in total forward so you can’t just nominate me.
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12.06.08
Posted in Arts & Culture, Books, Career, Life, Media & Internet, Theatre, Writing at 10.47 pm by Caitlin
Gentle readers, I need your advice.
The biggest lesson I need to learn in life is that I can do anything I want but I can’t necessarily do everything I want. I have to choose and focus. That’s hard.
Actually, maybe I can do everything I want – just not all at once. Rose Kennedy apparently once said: “You can have it all, my dear, but you can not have it all at once. Life is a journey with many different adventures and each part of it is special. Sometimes you will have to focus on the task at hand.”
It still comes down to the same thing. I need to choose what to focus on right now.
I am doing a lot of things in my life, all of which I enjoy. Yet there is an opportunity cost with anything I choose to do and right now I don’t feel that I’m concentrating on the really important things.
Here are some of the things I’m doing right now:
- Working as a freelance journalist – balancing making a living, pitching for new and interesting work and trying to figure out how my strategy to survive and thrive in a changing industry.
- General life stuff, including trying to keep fit and healthy.
- Organising our wedding in April next year.
Once of my most important goals is to finish writing my novel. To be honest, I’m not really making great progress on this goal.
I’m wondering if there is anything I should give up in order to make the time for this. I’m loath to give up the theatre given that I really love doing it and also aspire to write plays in the future – though maybe trying to do the novel writing and acting at the same time is too much. The British Museum doesn’t take up much of my time and I’ve already cut back so I’m comfortable with that. I obviously can’t give up life, or wedding organisation, or work, even if I wanted to.
The area where I feel I can cut back is social media. As I mentioned, I have three main blogs, plus also the occasional dated update on my professional site or True Wild Catches and Century of Books. All of this takes time and it’s not just a matter of writing my own posts and forgetting about them – the fun comes in being part of a blogging community, interacting with other bloggers, micro-blogging on Twitter (where I am undoubtedly spending too much time), using tools like StumbleUpon and Digg.
All this stuff is a lot of fun but it takes up a lot of time. I find it very hard to do social media in moderation – it’s the kind of thing where you have to jump in feet first, and as my frequent Twitter updates show, it’s very addictive! And really, with my industry (media) changing so quickly and so profoundly, it’s essential that I keep abreast of it. If anything, I should be doing more, not less – it would be valuable for me to try podcasting and online video production, for example.
The problem with blogging, as novelist A.L. Kennedy points out, is that there’s no definable end. You can never say a blog is done and there’s always more you can do for it, whether in writing, site design or promotion. I’m beginning to feel that part of the answer for me might be to reduce my blogs. It’s very hard to put a blog to death though so the question would be how – should I consolidate everything under my real name or on this blog? Or should I merge my food and travel blogs in some way? Or just stop writing one of them?
The other thing I really like the idea of is the Secular Sabbath – one day a week where you don’t use the computer or a mobile phone. I find this really appealing – I love the internet but the truth is, my brain is sometimes filled with digital detritus. I don’t know if there’s been any research but I do wonder whether too much time online is just as stifling to creativity and deadening as watching too much television.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best use my time? If you agree with my diagnosis, how should I rationalise my blogs?
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11.27.08
Posted in Career, Family & Friends, Life, London at 10.24 pm by Caitlin
No turkey and pumpkin pie on this side of the Pond, but I’ll take the opportunity to give thanks all the same
Happy Thanksgiving to any American readers. And happy belated Thanksgiving for my Canadian friends (who celebrated it a month ago).
Being Australian and living in Britain, Thanksgiving does not form part of my cultural heritage. Halloween has crept in (and actually has its origins in Europe anyway) but Thanksgiving is out and out a North American phenomenon.
Despite some debate over whether celebrating Thanksgiving is respectful of the native American population, and despite the fact that I don’t literally believe in a God to give thanks to, I do like the idea of Thanksgiving.
I think we could all do with a little more gratitude in our lives – after all, it’s said to be the secret of happiness. So much unhappiness in the world is caused by people wanting more than they already have – not only does this breed discontentment, but also their greed can be enormously destructive the other people and the world.
I don’t want to preach – I’m no angel, after all. But I thought I would take this moment to share with you some of the things I’m grateful for, at this very moment in time.
- The love of my very wonderful partner and the fact that we are committing to spending the rest of our lives together.
- My wonderful family and the fact that I see them once or twice a year and can speak regularly on the phone relatively cheaply, despite living half a world away – something that would have been unthinkable in times past.
- My friends, both at home in Australia, here in the UK, and around the world. I feel very connected and never lonely.
- My warm leather gloves. Also my coat, hat, scarf and knee-high boots. Not to mention my warm bed.
- The fact that I’ve been able to travel and see so much of this beautiful planet, from the Arctic to Africa.
- The pick-me-up from a good cup of coffee in the morning.
- The opportunity to spend a few years living in such a big, exciting city as London.
- My Australian passport and knowing that I can always go back home.
- Having enough food to eat. Having good food to eat. My health.
- Playing Miranda in The Tempest next Tuesday and the fun and creative fulfillment that comes from that.
- My lovely writer’s circle and the great feedback I get on my attempts at fiction.
Once I start, it’s hard to stop – I keep thinking of more and more things. Maybe there’s something in this gratitude thing! I’ll sign off now.
See: 25 Gentle Reminders to Cultivate Your Gratitude Attitude on EcoSalon.
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11.14.08
Posted in Career, Environment, Media & Internet, Writing at 6.24 pm by Caitlin
As a freelance writer I’m very interested in new media since I believe it will be a big part of my future. It’s not just a case of print publications moving online, it’s also a case of the internet throwing up new types of businesses. Educating myself about this is a large part of the reason why I blog – here and also at Roaming Tales and The Gooseberry Fool – and use social media tools such as Twitter.
I have some exciting news to share – I’m joining EcoSalon as a regular contributor. I’ve been asked to write two posts a week, one on green travel and one on green tech and lifestyle.
My first post is on eco-holidays in Cornwall, looking at walking, food, art and destinations such as the Eden Project. Cornwall is one of my favourite parts of Britain and, as I hope my photos show, an extremely beautiful part of the country. The post was published today and I’m delighted that it’s currently featured as the EcoSalon Daily Favourite right at the top of the site. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Leave a comment either here or on EcoSalon and if you like it, please feel free to share the link with your friends.
The theme of EcoSalon is about going green without sacrificing style and this is something that really strikes a chord with me. Readers who are familiar with this blog and my food blog The Gooseberry Fool might know that I am a passionate environmentalist. However, I also believe that people need inspiration and a reason for hope. We shouldn’t hide from the immensity of the challenge – but if we focus on doom and gloom, we risk generating despair rather than the committed and focused action the planet needs. Despair is just as destructive to the environment as denial.
I’m pleased to be blogging for EcoSalon because the blog is committed to the environment but with an aim to empower and inspire people rather than hector or scare them. There’s enough troubling environmental news out there – the question is what we can do about it.
I fully intend to keep my own sites and my blogging duties at EcoSalon are as well as, not instead of, what I already do. It’s a paid gig so this properly falls into my day job as a freelance writer and is probably a sign of things to come in my profession.
I’ve posted about this over at Roaming Tales as well. It’s been a busy day on the travel blog as I’ve welcomed a bunch of chatty, new readers from the Travel Blog Camp and also published my latest Photo Friday contribution.
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11.11.08
Posted in Career, Media & Internet, Travel at 8.00 am by Caitlin
Yesterday I actually exceeded my NaBloPoMo target of posting once per day. As well as my pumpkin post on The Gooseberry Fool, I also wrote up a report on the British Guild of Travel Writers awards evening for Roaming Tales. I could have saved the post for another day, but I wanted to get the news out straight away.
Today I’ve got a great collection of travel links over at Roaming Tales. Please head over and take a look and as always, I do appreciate it if anyone likes my content enough to vote it up on social media sites such as StumbleUpon (I’m TurtleHeart if anyone wants to add me as a friend) and Digg.
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