Stacy Horn

I’m sitting on my couch, trying to relax. Bleecker wasn’t tormenting Finney for a moment, but that just ended. He’s had a snack and now he’s trying to entice Finney to play.

Update: Bleeck chased Finney out of the spot to my left, and now he is napping beside me. (That smoke is my humidifer, which operates 24 hours a day all through the winter. I think the fact that I’ve always used a humidifer in the winter is one of the reasons I have good skin.)

It’s so unfair to Finney. I will have to make it up to him.

I was doing a search on the Workhouse on Blackwell’s Island, the section I’m working on now, when I came across this January 30, 1885 article about Charlotte Bronte’s nurse who was now an inmate of a Workhouse. There were a bunch of articles here and abroad about collecting money to get her out …

But they didn’t succeed. She died there the next year. This inspired an effort to raise money to give her a decent burial (the one below is from April 18, 1886). Sadly, I didn’t find any about the outcome. If they’d succeeded I think there would have been lots of article about the nice funeral they’d given her.

Well, we had another Echo catastrophe yesterday. I need to plan a mental health day for myself, but I can’t take it yet, and I’m supposed to start jury duty on Monday. I was actually looking forward to jury duty, but I don’t see how I can serve now (I’m the only one to respond to certain problems) and what if they don’t excuse me??

I had a really nice time on Sunday doing a Skype chat about my singing book with the North Shore Choral Society, a volunteer choir from Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. Thank you for inviting me, Linda Faller! It was a lovely break in the midst of a lot of madness. Choir people truly are the nicest people in the world. As if singing itself wasn’t a good enough reason to join a choir. But it’s really the singing and the people. Inseparable.

I have no new pictures because I’ve been inside either working or stressing about Echo. Here is yet another picture from the ballet rehearsal I went to recently. Before the nightmare began.

Echo Update: I estimate Echo will be back up in a day or two. People can ssh in now if you like, but you’ll find yourself in 2014. When Echo died we had our hosting service put together a virtual machine and now we’re running on a version of Echo we compiled and started working on in 2014 There’s a fuller version of this story in Item 317 in Central.

But if you’re going to SSH in email so I can alert you to some issues.

It’s a little hard to see, but this position cannot possibly be comfortable!

Vivian Swift, who I am friends with (<---bragging) sent me her new book, Gardens of Awe and Folly: A Traveler’s Journal on the Meaning of Life and Gardening. Thank you so much Vivian! I actually recently started another friend’s book, and it’s War & Peace length (not a complaint, this book is so far a masterpiece) so it’s going to be a while before I can start yours. But I am being absolutely and entirely sincere when I say I am so looking forward to your book. You are one of my favorite writers. (Not just saying that because we’re friends.)

I will also post more about Gardens of Awe and Folly after I’ve read it, but I wanted to alert people to the fact that it’s out! I know people here loved When Wanderers Cease to Roam.

I thought it would appropriate to get a little green in my picture of the book.