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 blanketContinue reading “Diving in on Day Two”
My Work-From-Home Experiment Begins
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 myContinue reading “My Work-From-Home Experiment Begins”
The Most Notorious Brothel Owner in Civil War Washington
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”
The Martian Menace
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 aContinue reading “The Martian Menace”
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes: Making an eBook
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 MisadventuresContinue reading “The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes: Making an eBook”
Women Playing Baseball in the 1910s
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 logoContinue reading “Women Playing Baseball in the 1910s”
Going to Hell
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. IContinue reading “Going to Hell”
I Was Told There Would Be No Math
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. JustContinue reading “I Was Told There Would Be No Math”
Revisiting the Washington That Never Was
You haven’t lived until you’ve digitally clipped mid-19th-century cursive from a scan of a faded and dirty print. This is B.F. Smith’s landscape of Washington, showing projected improvements in the capital city — the Washington Monument, a stone bridge across the Washington City Canal — from 1852. I found this on the Library of CongressContinue reading “Revisiting the Washington That Never Was”
The Cosmic Dance
I went to Big Lots yesterday. I didn’t intend to go to Big Lots — it was T.J. Maxx I wanted to visit — but while at Big Lots I snapped the photo above, of the crescent moon and Venus just after sunset. I wanted to go to T.J. Maxx because I’ve seen reports thatContinue reading “The Cosmic Dance”