For those of you out in my reading audience who have kids who are obviously NOT your particular ethnicity (such as Mere for us) - have you ever had any problems with official ID checks, on the line of ‘this really your kid’, questioning their ‘real’ citizenship and family status, or worse?  I’m talking about police pullovers on the road, checks at ( Read more... )

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Yes, I know I’m considered to be a real bug about such things, especially in alternate history fiction….

For my Swedish and Swedish-American readers in particular: Does THE EMIGRANTS / THE NEW LAND (Utvandrarna / Nybyggarna) strike you as real, as something that sounds/feels/is right in regards to the Swedish emigration to North America? (Others ( Read more... )

Languages are a hot item of discussion at our house, because - well, there’s a big language gap here.

Susan’s family is a mix of Norwegian, Danish and variations on British Isles, and there’s a little bit of the ‘Fargo’ Scandinavian-American accent there. Not much, mostly in word choice and the occasional ‘ya, sure‘ delivered with a wry tone, and ( Read more... )

Harbors open their doors to the young searching foreigner
Come to live in the light of the big L of liberty
Plains and open skies billboards would advertise
Was it anything like that when you arrived?
Dream boats carried the future to the heart of America
People were waiting in line for a place by the river!

It was time when strangers were ( Read more... )

Another bit of Rittenhousia, about the beginnings of paper-making in America, circa 1688 - this is from the Historical Magazine, 1857.  Again, for the record.

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More excerpts from the journal, this time from the day we actually adopted Meredith (the day after we got her).  Again, see some pictures of the day on Flickr - the picture below is something the Jiangmen paper later got out of the files of the orphanage when the paper was running that stupid ‘Dick the Wonder Sheep’ story about the twins in the ( Read more... )

• Hollywood Democrats shifting to Obama as a perceived winner and cutting off donations to Hillary.
• Major flip-flop on immigration by Romney caught; in 2006, he says ‘but you can’t just deport 12 million people’, and now, he says ‘oh, yes, you can and must.’ The Republican blooger who caught this one says: Flip, pander, flop, pander some more. I don’ ( Read more... )

For British expatriates in the USA, it’s a challenge.  In Mexico, you better be a legal resident.

“When it comes to foreigners, we’re a little more strict here,” said Alejandro Ruíz, director of education at the Mexican Automobile Association.

Turns out that the big ol’ fence on the Mexican border is being built with Chinese-made steel. Needless to say, the nativists who are big for the fence in the first place didn’t like that.