Winter Blizzard sidesteps Willow Grove - Surprise visit from Dan and Grace yesterday - Compass fini

What dyou think, Rob? Four inches on my birdbath? Bet you didn't get much in Conshohocken.

Here I am printing out the entire Compass... nearly 80 pages. I'll proof em tonite or tomro. Scott came over earlier and saw the ms. sitting on my purple chair. What is this, your novel? he asked.

No, I said it's the next issue of the Compass.

Back cover will be by Carl Yeager. It's not this one....

Photo by Carl Yeager. I'd use it but it's going the wrong way. I need an up n down! Hey, it actually cropped itself when I published the blog post.

Dan and Grace came over yesterday. You know how you need a kick to do something? Well, I hate filling my pillbox, which was sitting on the living room couch, so I quick did dat before they arrived.

Again, Grace squeezed into the windowsill corner of the living room, spun the Replogle, and asked Dan, "Where's Japan?"

"What?"  "Why Japan?"

I was talking to a guy named Del on the phone. He's the webmaster of a foundation where I'm applying for a grant but something kept going wrong, so the foundation had Del call me.

While I'm "clearing my recent history," accdg to his directions, I tell Dan, "She got a doll made in Japan and that's why she wants to know where it is."

Word is, Grace never forgets a thing. Eidetic memory?

Hey, I say, why don't we call Sarah and wish her a happy b'day.

Dan got her on his iPhone. Look at her sweet smiling face.

And the little rascal, who never stops talking, refused to say a single word, burying her head on the couch in Sarah's old room.

Oh, for pete's sake Grace, give us a word or a laugh. She was tired.

Sarah said she felt like she was with us!

Every phone Grace saw in the house she picked up and called her mom at work and Mom-mom at home, who was recovering from one of the noroviruses going round. Just learned that word w/my non-eidetic memory.

Guess what? Google ain't working too well.  Does it snow in Mountain View? No, but with everyone on the East Coast snowed in, she's overworked, but certainly not underpaid.

Spin me, Dan! He did. Then he hopped on, wanting to enjoy it with her. "Get off, Dan. I wanna be by myself."

She calls him Dan.

I always walk them out to the car. Then I ran upstairs to get back to work on the Compass. My proofreader Ada is in Florida so I printed it out this afternoon and will go over it while listening to the blues on XPN.

I found a really important article by Dr Daniel B Fisher, a psychiatrist with schizophrenia, which I'll excerpt in this issue. Read the whole thing here.

I believe in working real hard and then rewarding myself by watching movies.

I called Scott, who never answers the phone, and said, "You've gotta watch this film noir on YouTube starring Barbara Stanwyck and Wendell Corey. It's called "The File on Thelma Jordan."



Nearly two hours of pure suspense. I lay on my downstairs red couch under two blankets. It was gorgeous outside - with the white sparkly snow - and I knew it would get dark while I watched the film, so I got up sev'l times to open the front door and see the beautiful world outside.

Well, I'll tell you something. At the end of the film one of the people in the photo above will no longer see the beautiful world.

As usual, I checked on the NY Times. A slide show of the world's largest cruise ship - The Queen Mary, docked outside Red Hook in Brooklyn - reminded me of the cruise Sarah and I took in 2010, before our kidney transplant.


This is actually another cruise ship, but it reminded me of my death-defying swim in the freezing salt water pool on our ship.

I figured that I'd either swim a few laps or save Sarah's kidney trying to do it.

You never know. I may be in the Afterlife now.