Spent the past few days sick and yesterday was my first day back in action. And since this is the first time I’ve logged into my blog since then, I also have 4,502 “comments” to moderate. Primarily spam. And every once in a while, a message from Chris or Henry. Days like this one wonders if she should turn off the comments feature again.

News and successes:

1. The coffee house around the corner from my office has re-opened. This means that the business that has been the only open property in a four-block radius since the storm now has competition. Nothing like a coffee house to compete with the V.I.P. Massage Lounge. It occurred to me yesterday that in ten years our street will look very different. There are signs of promise but evidence of the difficulty of that too. It occurred to me that the evolution needs to be photographed. Or at least described. Henceforth, description.

2. In looking at historic records recently, I couldn’t figure out where the Jung Hotel was. This is why people and their stories are so important. The day after I discovered it was across the street from my office (in a building that has been gutted and boarded and abandoned since the storm), I walked into the office of a stranger for a different purpose. And luck would have it that she worked at the Jung Hotel as a young woman.

3. The cucumbers in the garden show promise. They have about 17 flowers. We check on the plants every morning and evening. It’s amazing how much changes in a cucumber plant’s life on a daily basis. I wonder: if we checked on the tomato plants this much, would they be doing as well?

Happy to read that Ross is also reading non-fiction. I didn’t understand my sudden apathy for poetry and The English Patient (which is so much like poetry), although once I sunk into a good essay (Mimi Schwartz’s “Off the Record” about her visit to Benheim, the village her Jewish family had to leave — “leave” is too gentle a word sometimes – with Rolf, her translator and a graduate student of Holocaust studies at the University of Mannheim, No. 3, 2006 issue of The Missouri Review), I remembered why I miss non-fiction so much and how it makes me think about poetry, or at least how real both forms are.

What do you make of a man who enters — “enters” is too gentle a word sometimes — his old girlfriend’s apartment and steals her Waterford crystal? Short story finally underway.

xanax is a controlled substance

Experiments have shown that short duration exposure to very high levels of RF radiation can cause cataracts in rabbits.