Stacy Horn

With the help of my next door neighbor Eamon, and Peter, one of the landlord’s workers, I believe I’ve blocked every possible mouse entryway. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of openings, as you can see in the first picture below.

I’ve got strips of wood, which I painted green to match the trim, and patches of steel wool (covered with duct tape) everywhere. They go up and around the kitchen cabinets, and behind and around the stove and the refrigerator. The only other gaps were in the bathroom, and I’d already covered those up years ago. One more picture below …

You can see how much my apartment tilts. It’s insane. The building is over 100 years old, so I guess it makes sense that it has settled and shifted over the century, but still. Anyway, yesterday morning I heard scratching, scratching, scratching, but no mice ever appeared! Added benefit: I should never see one of those huge, horrifying, flying cockroaches ever again either.

And I haven’t died from hantavirus yet! God, I worked myself up into a complete state of panic last night about not cleaning up properly after my mice. My mice. Ha. I’m going to make a video of the jigsaw puzzle of wood barriers I made around my apartment. But I think it’s working. This morning, instead of seeing mice I heard scratching!

A diner I passed by coming home from my recent Queens cemetery trip.

Decorating the tree at Ground Zero, the one in front of the firehouse. The guy in the beard, who is also putting the flag on the top of the tree, is my friend Les Speiser.

The musicians are: Matt Hughes with Giovanni Koll on the piano, Ellen Cooper with David Goldman on piano, and members and friends of Manhattan Samba. One singer is not in this movie because she said her song was a secret work in progress so I didn’t film it. But she and the song were great, for the record!

I hope their current spouses don’t mind, but I was looking through some old photographs and I came across a picture of my oldest and dearest friend, Christine Hegarty, and her then boyfriend Jim Kogel. They both look so beautiful I’m including a close-up of their faces. This was shot in my Waltham, Massachusetts apartment, so that means it was taken around from 1977. I moved to Cambridge the next year.