Author: Stacy Horn

The Wild Bird Fund posted this on their Facebook page (I’m sorry for the upsetting photograph, but I’m hoping it will lead to your emailing these people, as it did for me):

One morning, one building: 28 birds dead, 2 found alive. These are all migrants, most have flown thousands of miles to be here only to crash into a condo building’s windows.

This happened at Circa Central Park, a glass-fronted building recently constructed right next to Central Park, one of the most important migratory stopovers on the East Coast. These deaths occur daily here every spring and fall.

There are many solutions, but the building owners have to implement them. If you’d like to voice your concerns, consider calling or emailing: http://circacentralpark.com/contact

And if you’d like to help us during this intense time, we thank you: bit.ly/wbfdonate

They cracked down on the crowds at the pier at Christopher Street and this is what it looks like now. A little sad, but safe.

My birthday is in a couple of weeks and I’m turning 64! Chances are NYC will still be closed, but that’s fine. It won’t affect my birthday really. I can’t do some of the things I like to do, like go to the movies in the middle of the afternoon while everyone else is at work, or to a museum, or get a pedicure, but I honestly don’t care. It would be nice! But it’s not important.

I have to come up with a plan b though. Binge watch something fun? It’s hard for me to find things to watch because I cannot tolerate tension, anything bad happening, or unhappy endings. Even when I’m re-watching something and I know everything will turn out alright I can’t stand it when there’s tension, and the threat that it won’t.

I’m almost finished with a book I’m enjoying (The End of October, about a pandemic!) and I don’t have the next one lined up. That’s what I could really use, my next good book.

While taking a nice long walk yesterday I learned that dog parks have opened back up. That made me happy. Dogs need their parks. And their owners get to visit too. Good doggies!

After reading a very convincing essay in the Times, I bought a pulse oximeter. It’s very comforting to read that my oxygen saturation is great, and so is my pulse, which remains satisfyingly low due to my regular exercise. For those who’d like to know, I bought the CLINICAL GUARD Fingertip Pulse Oximeter CMS50DL.

A while back I wrote the Oil-Dri Corporation of America, the manufacturers of the cat litter I use, Jonny Cat, to ask them why the clay had changed. They wrote back explaining that they’d started using different mines. They also sent me coupons for free litter and these two Jonny Cat stuffed animals. This morning I sewed tiny paper towel masks on them, took a picture of them social distancing, and sent it to Oil-Dri. That was a mood lifter. But then …

After that, I recorded myself singing the soprano part for Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir 6. I’ve done three of these before, but, well, I’ve aged! My voice has never sounded so bad. It took everything I had to upload it anyway, and the only reason I did was because I knew I’d feel worse if I didn’t. Ugh. I am glad I made myself do it though. Your voice going at least a little downhill is just a byproduct of still being alive. So screw it. I’m going to keep on singing.