Eh. Or Urp.

Poor Avocado has a stomach bug. At about 5am we were wakened to calls and sinister sounds, and had to mop up the floor since, as she pathetically put it, It Was Very Sudden. Since then she's thrown up three more times, and is lying in a darkened room with the dog at her feet, the very model of sick-child pathos. The dog, not to be outdone, is off her feed too, so they're sharing their misery. It wouldn't be vacation without someone being sick.

In Passing

Every year the last New York Times Magazine of the year is the "Lives They Lived" edition. I love this, because, while they note the Great and Notorious in passing, many, if not all of the lives they mention are people I hadn't heard of, or whose importance I hadn't realized. This year's edition is no exception. Along with Liz Claiborne, Charles Nelson Reilly and Brett Somers, Thomas Eagleton, and David Halberstam, there are pieces on Madeleine Stern, whom I knew only as the editor of Louisa Alcott's blood-and-thunder magazine stories; on Jimmy Connors' mother Gloria, who brought her son up a tennis player from the cradle; on Mary Crisp, a Republican I think I would have been proud to know; and Andrée de Jongh, who smuggled Allied soldiers out of Nazi-occupied Belgium.

The result of this issue of the Magazine is, always, to make me wish I had known more about these people while they were alive. Failing that, I like that they are remembered here, in this way. Go look. You might be edified.