In 2004-05, I was very fortunate to take the fall and spring quarters off from my usual teaching job at Evergreen. In the fall I traveled to England (Northumberland), Northern Ireland, and Donegal in the Republic. I also worked very hard on the development of the manuscript for a mystery novel. In winter quarter I taught individual learning contracts to some excellent students, and devoted much of my free time to the creation of a comedy play with Stacey Stearns, one of my former students. In spring I traveled to Nashville to take extensive notes on the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the city and its environs to add strength to my mystery novel; I began its revision. I also completed the manuscript of The Ethnomusicologists’ Cookbook: Complete Meals from Around the World. During the summer I traveled around the North Atlantic on the Semester at Sea. I kept quite the blog!