I don’t know about anyone else, but my sleep patterns have turned to utter chaos these last three weeks. One night I might have bifurcated sleep (sleep, significant break, sleep), the next restless near-insomnia, and the next ten solid hours of sleeping like the dead. That, at least, has been my pattern over these last … Continue reading Wrapping Up the Catalog Copy
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Over the weekend I spent some time cleaning up my office space in my apartment. If I have to work from home for a couple of weeks, I’m going to need a comfortable environment. When I went out on Saturday for supplies and to pick up my new prescription, I also picked up a table … Continue reading Office Space (Not the Movie)
Even without my alarm clock going off, my bladder “knew” when I normally woke up to go to work, and it roused me at six-thirty. I got up, took care of business, turned on the coffee pot, and opened the apartment’s front door. The clouds were pretty at dawn, and I wanted to capture the … Continue reading Spring Fever at Week’s End
“At dawn, on the fifth day, look to the east…”
If the first day of working from home was a strange and new and exciting experience, the second day felt more routine. I got out of bed at 7:30, though I’d been awake for several hours before that. It was another night of rough sleep; it was difficult to get comfortable temperature-wise (take a blanket … Continue reading Diving in on Day Two
For ten years, the Snoopy coffee mug sat on my desk at Diamond, first on Greenspring Avenue, then on York Road. I’d bought it some years before at the Big Lots in Eldersberg. I liked the message — “Is there no one to rescue me?!” It seemed… apropos. As I gathered up things in my … Continue reading My Work-From-Home Experiment Begins
This week, I explained to several colleagues at Diamond what the desktop wallpaper on my monitor at work is, which you can see above — a painting of Washington, DC done by Edward Sachse in the early 1850s. (Be sure to check out this Maryland Historical Society article on his Bird’s Eye View of Baltimore.) … Continue reading The Most Notorious Brothel Owner in Civil War Washington
There are Sherlock Holmes novels. And there are novels starring Sherlock Holmes. There’s a difference, a subtle one, but still a difference. A Sherlock Holmes novel has the usual trappings — the client upon the stair, a few cuts at the violin strings, some deduction, a hansom cab out on a dark night on a … Continue reading The Martian Menace
Throughout January I worked, off and on, on something of a private project, to make an ebook of Ellery Queen’s long-out-of-print anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. An anthology of Sherlock Holmes parodies, sprinkled with a few genuine pastiches and two play scripts, essentially a survey of non-Doyle Sherlock Holmes literature to mid-century, The Misadventures … Continue reading The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes: Making an eBook
Recently while digging around on the Library of Congress website I found a series of photographs of young women playing baseball. The photos were undated; they had a range between 1909 and 1923, nothing more specific. The uniforms resembled those worn by Ida Schnall’s New York Female Giants in 1913, though without the stitched logo … Continue reading Women Playing Baseball in the 1910s
After work, I stopped at the grocery store, the Giant off Queen Street. I needed milk and bread and vanilla sandwich cookies. Though we’re three weeks past Christmas, there was a display dump of Christmas books. And it caught my attention. Oh, did it ever! “The boy! In the red poofball hat!” I exclaimed. I … Continue reading Going to Hell
Some parts of my job I rarely, if ever, talk about. Working on the monthly, annual, and now decennial sales charts is one of those things. There was a lot of math involved for the decennial tables, limited as they are, but before I got to the math there was a lot of thinking. Just … Continue reading I Was Told There Would Be No Math