feeling under the weather?

In 1957, my entire family was struck with the Asian Flu when we lived in Farmington, New Mexico. We would stagger from bed to bathroom - from bed to kitchen. I was the only one who was able to stagger around long enough to prepare meals. We would have breakfast food at breakfast, soups for lunch, and quite likely breakfast food at dinner-time - with lots of water, hot lemonades and honeyed teas throughout the day.

We were wiped out! Not literally, of course or I would not be blogging about this experience. In 1957 who could fathom I would be blogging?? Who knew about blogging anyway??

Once a pandemic flu begins to spread (especially now with our ease of worldwide travel), millions of persons can be affected.

Dr. Nicole Talbot (my HERO-ine) eased my pain and discomfort caused by a regular common cold. We are quite fortunate in Guadalupe County to have excellent medical facilities and doctors.

We are also fortunate to have in place emergency preparations and training - proactive planning.

The Emergency Management Office of Guadalupe County has been training and educating for all types of emergencies and hundreds of local volunteers will help in various situations - such as an outbreak of flu.

On March 19, 2009, the Gazette Enterprise reported that emergency management and their counterparts in Guadalupe County, Texas, had prepared for a mass vaccination program in the event of a pandemic. “Local officials have 36 hours to treat their entire population — in Guadalupe County that would be 115,000 people,” Ron Maloney writes for the newspaper.

"(Ken) Kinsey and(Dan) Hays are preparing for a May 2 dress rehearsal of a pandemic disaster at the Navarro ISD. Volunteers will set up and operate a 'drive through' POD in which they will take a practice run at registering, screening and pretending to inoculate 100 volunteers so they can identify whatever problems might come up and prepare to meet them."

We count our blessings!

Moving Pictures!

I remember all of these old movie magazines and think that I bought every issue during the 1950s. Couldn't wait to read about the movies and the stars and get the scoop on everyone. I wrote to Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Debbie Reynolds (forget some of the others) and received postcard photos with their signature. Wish I had them now.

Actress Natalie Portman and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur Christine Aylward have developed an online site (Making of) which purports to be behind the scenes about the movie making business.

so many books!

"When I was little, I was so girlie and ambitious, I was practically a drag queen. I wanted to be everything at once: a prima ballerina, an actress, a model, a famous artist, a nurse, an Ice Capades dancer, and Batgirl. I spent inordinate amounts of time waltzing around our living room with a doily on my head, imagining in great detail my promenade down the runway as the new Miss America, during which time I would also happen to receive a Nobel Prize for coloring.

"The one thing I did not want to be was a hippie."

"...'you're not a hippie,' said my mother, fanning incense around our living room with the sleeves of her dashiki. 'You're four years old. You run around in a tutu. You eat TV dinners and complain when the food doesn't look exactly like it does on the packages. Hippies don't do that,' she said. 'Hippies don't make a big production out of eating their Tater Tots.'

" 'Come to think of it, hippies don't torture their little brother by trying to sell him the silverware, either,' she added. "if I were you, I'd worry less about being a hippie and more about being an extortionist.' "

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote about Susan Jane Gilman: "Publishers' frantic search for the 'female David Sedaris' may have finally come to an end."

David Foster Wallace

Chapter E Unibus Pluram
television and U.S. fiction

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.


But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out of their fly, whether there's maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers and starers.


The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people's attention. Dislike being watched. The exceptions to this rule -- Mailer, McInerney -- sometimes create the impression that most belletristic types covet people's attention. Most don't. The few who like attention just naturally get more attention. The rest of us watch.

Life before death

David Foster Wallace

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say that good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforable."

readers, writers, book reviewers - and bloggers

The Rise of the Literary Blog

"Books are humanity in print." ~ Barbara W. Tuchman