So is it a bad thing when I can barely keep my contempt for a show out of the recaps I do? It's tough sometimes. Usually I confine the bile to quizzes, which my editors can decline to run.

God, I wish I was doing this for TWOP. Bile is welcomed there.

This does not, of course, mean that I will turn down this job. They're still paying me to watch TV. I mean, come on -- that's gotta be some kind of nirvana situation, even if it does involve FOX.

1) We may have the slowest post office in the entire city of Chicago. Harumph.

2) Grocery shopping while cranky/crampy is not a wise choice.

3) I like to think that I'm a rugged-individualist-type woman, but my uterus caves to peer pressure in nothing flat. I was commiserating with a friend about her lousy week the other day, and she mentioned in passing that, to top it all off, she had cramps. I made sympathetic noises, but my uterus immediately said "Cramps? I'm supposed to be having cramps now? What a great idea!" Stupid uterus.

4) Despite all that, my day got better when I semi-finalized a five-month gig with Ragan and got word of another cool assignment from Jane. Whee!

5) Which is a good thing, because I think my unemployment insurance just ran out. Timing is everything.

Randall is a Canadian living in Hong Kong. I read his blog and get horribly nostalgic. This picture, and all his comments about the Victoria park flower market, which sells the stuff people need for Chinese New Year, is really getting to me now.

We did buy a kumquat tree one year, but it developed little bugs and had to go. So I don't know how lucky it actually was.

The Susan Jersild mystery solved: It's my dad's cousin Susie, who I've met, but who I somehow didn't connect. Duh.

Plus, we have this update from my aunt Elaine: Susie Jersild Kolb is James' and my cousin, mother of Cindy, minister, and daughter of Uncle Gerhardt, deceased.  Uncle Gerhardt was the brother of your grandfather, my father.  Susie used to be able to recite all the books of the Bible and she could touch her nose with her tongue. 

What can I say? We Jersilds are a talented lot.

Continuing the bizarre quasi-stalking theme, Angie tells me that she got a call from someone from the Learning Channel or something asking her about her tornado-striken wedding. How did they know about it? From a little blurb I wrote about it for this wedding website I did for WebPoint at TMS. Now, considering WebPoint no longer exists, you'd think that the site would have disappeared. Nope. It's still out there. Weird.

An early Jersild Day mystery:

I just got a letter from an anonymous someone with a newspaper clipping about Susan Jersild from the 11/26/1943 edition of the Chicago Sun.

The letter reads:

"Hello -- You don't know me, but I was at the library looking through old newspapers and came across this article. I looked in the telephone book and saw your address and name, so I thought you might enjoy having it. God Bless."

Not signed, no return address.

The clipping reads:

"At the age of 4, Susan Jersild, of S. Leavitt St., is an authority on the bible. The little girl can name the 66 books of the gospel and can detail the lives of 15 Biblical characters. In addition, she has memorized 10 church hymns. Susan picked up her knowledge from Bible stories read to the family every night by her father, G. S. Jersild, an attorney, and in a Bible class at St. John the Divine Church, where her dad is the Sunday School superintendent."

I'm sure Susan Jersild is related to me somehow, but I don't know how.

Cool. Weird. Eerie.

Now, of course, I'm being paranoid and searching for anthrax spores.

More tech fiddling today -- still working on it. Maybe by this weekend everything will work.

On the upside, I got a whole bunch of comic books. In return for cataloging Dean's collection, I get to read comic books. I love leaching off my geek friends.

Fun with electricity.

I've just discovered that concurrent use of the desktop, laser printer, space heater, stereo, and overhead lights plus reading lights is officially too much for the fuse that handles the front of my house. Joy.

One more time.....

How about now?

Hrm. It doesn't seem to want to update. Silly blogger.

I tried to exploit some geek friends to network my computers and printers and such last night, but it all went horribly awry when one forgot something vital. Harumph. Also, he didn't bring the comic books. Harumph again.

It was not a totally wasted evening, however -- good dinner (tomato-basil lasagna with proscuitto -- I do feed those I exploit), and a productive session of coming up with names for characters in their books.

I have a lot of reference books -- character-naming sourcebooks with names and their meanings from different cultures, various books of mythology from all over the world, encyclopedias of fantasy, travel books, a kick-ass world atlas, dictionaries and Bartlett's quotations and various and sundry reference standards ... you get the idea.

But when we were looking for the name of a possibly sinister, old-money preppy character, there was only one place to turn: My high school yearbooks.

God help me.