I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but here, it’s ridiculous.  It just turned eight o’clock on the morning and it’s already seventy degrees, and very muggy, so that seventy feels like eighty.  It got to nearly 100 yesterday, and it’s supposed to do the same today and tomorrow.  It’s a good thing…

I wasn’t going to write a blog entry today, because a mess of a night with a couple of family emergencies–minor, but energetic–meaning that I am LITERALLY running on no sleep.  Okay.  I conked for about an hour after lunch, sitting up on the love seat. But still.  I’m in no shape.  And I know I…

When I was in high school, I went through a period of reading everything I could get by any living French writer I had ever heard of–on the unformed assumption, I think, that if I couldn’t get up and move to Paris right that minute, I could at least anticipate the move by living there…

It’s Saturday, and barely seven o’clock, and my day has already gone to hell in a handbasket. Seriously. I’m in one of those not in any position to make sense moods where I don’t even want the  Beethoven, never mind the Bach.  And I just realized that I may have made yet another mistake in…

It’s the 15th of July, and for those of you who were confused on Wednesday–that was my birthday, but although I was born on Friday, the 13th, it wasn’t a Friday.  And I like Mozart. This morning I got up very early and tried to do something resembling sensible work.  I even managed it, for…

Today there will be Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Loud.

This is a story I did not know.  It came up in the Bourgeois Virtues book, and I’ve been walking around it ever since. On July 15, 1995, a Dutch force under the command of the United Nations handed over 8,000 Muslim men and boys to the Bosnian Serbs–without firing a shot.  They did this…

Every once in a while, I do this thing where I post questions on FB in order to get answers that mean…I don’t know what. The questions are always about mysteries, and mystery writers, and mystery reading.  Sometimes I don’t do questions so much as I do comments. I also always do this from my…

The day before yesterday, a woman I had once gone to kindergarten with, died.  She was not a woman I knew well.  I don’t think I’d see her since I was sent by my parents to my eventual girls’ school.  I remember her very distinctly, however, because for some reason–completely inexplicable to me–she forms one…

For some reason or the other, I’ve spent the last couple of days having the worst pollen-induced sneezing fits so far this summer.   They’ve been bad enough so that I’ve sometimes sat around thanking The Universe Broadly Conceived for the fact that they didn’t happen a week ago, because sneezing like this I’d never have…