Author: Stacy Horn

I just came across this shot I took of me and Bali, one of my cats. I guess this is the kind of love most people reserve for their children but I do love my cats. We lost two kittens at the animal hospital where I work, and their deaths really hit me hard. Oh god. I keep seeing them! I’m trying to neutralize that by wallowing in my living cats.

I wrote about the unsolved murder of Jean Sanseverino in my book The Restless Sleep. The neighborhood where she died has certainly come up in the world. At the time Jean was murdered this was an apartment building for low income renters and the neighborhood was packed with bars and mobsters. “We weren’t allowed to walk down State Street,” a woman who grew up nearby remembered. (From my book.) Jean lived there rent free in exchange for light housekeeping duties and was thrilled with the arrangement.

I watched this film closely, having seen the original police photographs (and I was in the building around 2005/6). It’s just such a beautiful home, and if I lived in it I’d consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world. But it still got me seeing him walk through what for me was the crime scene. In my mind I was seeing it as it looked on that terrible day in 1951.

But look at the building now. If you have six and half million dollars, buy it! The whole block is beautiful. At the time I wrote my book the Brooklyn Botanic Garden held a contest for the Greenest Block in Brooklyn (I believe it still does) and the block where this building is won first place in both 1998 and 1999, prompting the contest organizers to make the rule that no block can win two years in a row. “From a horticultural and aesthetic perspective, that block is one of the most beautiful blocks in New York, not just Brooklyn,” (Ellen Kirby, of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at the time).

Sarah Jessica Parker is opening a store for her line of shoes about fifty feet from my apartment. I don’t wear heels so these shoes will not be a temptation. That said, I hope to see very pretty windows filled with very pretty to look at shoes.

This is for my friends, because I was talking about these two items, the soup plate and the mug.

Back story on the soup plate: When I worked for Mobil they had a cafeteria and I loved the dishware, mostly because of the Pegasus logo. They let everyone take pieces of it when they moved to Virginia and I have always regretted that I only took a few items. What was I thinking??

Well, I saw a Mobil soup plate on Etsy and immediately bought it!! And immediately started feeling a little buyer’s remorse. $50 for a plate, what was I thinking?? But it came today and I just love it.

Back story on the mug: My cats broke my current favorite coffee cup the other morning, as they do. Motherfuckers. So I was on the hunt for a new favorite coffee cup. I found this one today at Fishs Eddy. I needed something small, and I wanted something simple this time. I actually drink my coffee from a thermos (because it stays warm) and only take the first few sips from a mug. This one is lovely. It has a shiny silver band along the rim which gives it a ever-so-slight hint of Christmas.

I’ve become addicted to watching Ryan Hall report on extreme weather. You can watch his videos here. If supercells are forming down south (the poor, beleaguered south) and other areas of the country, I can’t look away. Hall has a very impressive operation. He works with storm chasers, a meteorologist named Andy, and a person named Carly who reaches out to the local police, firefighters, etc., to report on what is happening in the areas they are following. All of whom, in addition to Andy, have become knowledgable about meteorology and they’ll explain just what is happening.

This is my view from the couch, including Bali, who is taking advantage of my time not moving for hours! What you’re seeing on that screen in addition to Ryan are radar views, the views from the storm chasers, a viewer chat on the right, and the current number of warnings—and there are different types of warning, starting from bad to worst, if I’m remembering the order correctly: Tornado Watch, Tornado Warning Radar Indicated, Tornado Warning Radar Confirmed, Tornado Warning Observed, Tornado Warning PDS (Potentially Dangerous Situation) and Tornado Emergency.