in Moscow

I gain new respect for the art of suitcase making every time I travel. It takes a hell of a lot to make a suitcase that will survive even one journey – especially if it’s large and falls into the hands of a grad student who is too cheap to take a cab. I was mentally [...]

medical wisdom

Five days before leaving Ekaterinburg I caught the tail end of a flu epidemic that, some weeks ago, led to several school closings due to quarantine. Fortunately, I’m done with all the archives, and all the most important library stuff – although I was planning to comb the card catalog for the last stray memoirs. [...]

long-lost relatives

Last night I got a phone call from my grandma’s brother. I was seven or eight last time I saw him, and I only have a few scattered recollections from that visit: long scratches on my arms from picking raspberries in his garden, huge chunks of watermelon, which my grandma examined through her reading glasses, [...]

I checked my blog stats for the first time today and discovered to my great surprise and delight that at least two people stop by here on any day. And then surprise and delight were replaced by shame. I have not been posting a lot lately. I’m sorry. I’ll pour some ashes on my head [...]

I got almost no work done this afternoon. I showed up at the archive and all, but my documents didn’t show up until four, and even then the ruckus in the room was such that focused reading was perfectly impossible and I couldn’t skim, because I just started on an entirely new collection. Criminal [...]

squee!

in which the author doesn’t act her age