Monday Book Quatrain
A girl on a tropical island will hear the prediction of a crown
But gain only France, a vicomte, children and unhappiness.
Revolution and Terror vividly evoked sweep a king and queen away.
A broken widow falls into the hands of an adventurer from Corsica.
An Astronomical Opportunity
Not many people have seen the planet Mercury. It’s easy to find Venus and Mars and Jupiter and even Saturn, but Mercury’s small and close to the sun and elusive. According to Renaissance gossip (and I do love Renaissance gossip) Copernicus himself never saw Mercury.
However! Now’s your chance! For the next couple of weeks Mercury and Venus will appear unusually close together (they’re actually on opposite sides of the sun, but stargazing is tricksy like that). Because Venus is one of the brightest objects in the night sky you can use it as a marker to help you find Mercury. Just look in the lower western sky about an hour after sunset. The brightest star you see? That will be Venus. Look down and to the right for Mercury. Have a pair of binoculars or a small telescope? Even better. They’ll appear closest together on April 3rd and 4th, and the conjunction will continue through about April 10th.
Why bother? Well, Mercury, the planet of communication, is going into retrograde again around the middle of April. Communication snafus, here we come. So at least this time we can look Mercury straight in the eye and say, “Not with my queries/submissions/revisions, you don’t.”
Dogless and Quiet
An unnaturally quiet day today—both dogs are at the vet’s for minor surgeries. No claws clicking on the quarry tile! No liquid dark eyes following every bite of food from plate to mouth! All will not be right with the world (as dear Mr. Browning’s Pippa would say) until the dogs are in the house again.
ETA: Dogs are home safely. Boo looks like a fighter who’s been in one too many fights (two skin tags removed from his face, so shaved patches and scabs), and Cressie looks like a Frankenstein-dog, with two BIG shaved patches and stitched-up incisions, one on the left side of her neck and the other on the right side of her shoulder. Everything was benign, thank goodness. Now to fight the battle of “No, Cressie, no scratching!” I wonder if there’s such a thing as a backwards Elizabethan collar that fits around a dog’s waist, to keep it from scratching with its back legs. Heh.
Book Monday
What I just finished reading (actually for the umpteenth time): my tattered, treasured copy of Zelda, Nancy Milford’s wonderful, terrible, mesmerizing biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. This is the book I return to whenever I’m struggling with my own writing—Zelda and Scott’s struggles are always so much more heartbreaking and heartrending than my own.
What I’m going to read next: a crisp new copy of Cleopatra’s Daughter by Michelle Moran. I loved Rome on HBO (Thirteeeeeeen!) and this looks like it pretty much picks up where Rome left off. I do wish they had kept Max Pirkis as Octavian. He’s certainly the Octavian I’m going to be visualizing as I read this.
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. —Groucho Marx
Spring? Where?
Today is the first day of Spring, tra-la. We woke up to this—an extremely unseasonable blanket of snow. Brrr! Boudin, a sensible Cajun doggie, refused to go out in the nasty cold wet stuff. Cressie, on the other hand, with her Canadian heritage, bounded out happily. Here you see her sniffing those special snow-enhanced smells. (We did eventually coax Mr. Boo out for a brief pit stop.)
On the far right, note the white tubs we put over our tender new rose plants to protect them from this outrage. At the top leftish-center, see the little chartreuse balsa-wood birdhouse the house wrens love so dearly, heaped with snow on top. Poor shivery wrens. Ah, the joys of spring at Casa Loupas.
Our pear trees have been denuded of their blossoms and look so sad I couldn’t even bear to take a picture of them. Who knows if they will have the heart to bloom again this year?
The Second Duchess
Read the First Chapter
The Second Duchess is available on iBookstore!
