Thanks to a stomach bug, yesterday's planned sightseeing and museum-visiting in the city had to be cancelled. Georg and I were both horribly sick Sunday night and neither one of us was up to traipsing around the city. Especially since it snowed overnight and the high was around 25° F. I had to cancel my visit with Womzilla, Nellorat and Supergee too because I didn't want to risk passing on the bug to them. A night of being violently ill isn't exactly the christmas gift I had in mind. Oh well, nothing to be done about it. Maybe we'll be up for a trip to city this afternoon.
Instead of sightseeing we spent the day lying around feeling queasy and sorry for ourselves and watching TV. We saw a show on the History Channel which featured an actor dressing up in costumes and re-enacting the worst jobs in various historical periods. It wasn't actually the absolute worst jobs, I think: that show would have been so depressing it wouldn't make good entertainment. It was more like "unusual and unpleasant jobs." Like for instance, in the show on the Tudor era he dressed up like a fishwife and got ducked into a pond for being an uppity woman. In another episode he talked about the guy who painted the frescoes inside the dome of St. James Cathedral. That must have been a hard job, but hardly the worst.
On the other hand, in the Victorian episode he covered jobs that really were among the worst from my understanding: scavengar, chimney sweep, rat catcher, tanner, road-digger, workhouse inmate. He actually acted out the rat-catcher, coating his hands with a sugary syrup, then sticking his bare hand into a mound of straw and pulling out of a rat! The rat looked pretty tame. It seemed perfectly OK about being pulled out of the straw and then held up to the camera, and didn't even try to bite him.
In other bad news, I got a phone call first thing yesterday morning from someone I met through an online forum. She and I and another woman get together every couple of months for lunch. Neither one of us had been on the forum in ages, and she just checked in this morning and discovered that the third woman's husband died a couple of days ago. Apparently he had cancer & it came on very suddenly. She was so close to her husband. The way she talked about him it was clear that they had a great relationship. He was young too; mid 60s I think. Her father died earlier this year too. It's just heartbreaking.
Even though I never met her husband, I'd like to go to the funeral. But I may not get back to NC in time. We agreed that we'd give her a couple of days and then call her and see if she wants to get together. She may not be up for company but even if so, at least she'll know that we're thinking about her.
Hi Sarah & Georg, We are so sorry you were both ill on the new New York trip. Perhaps you picked the bug up with your luggage at Philadelphia Airport. I too watched and enjoyed the series on unpleasent jobs on The History Channel. I believe that the protagonist (Tony Richardson ?) played Baldrick, the idiot straight man to Rowan Atkinson in the Blackadder series. A slight correction: It was St. Paul's Cathedral in London where the dome paintings were being restored, not St. James'. We visited this in 1966. I think you may be confusing St. Paul's with St. James Infirmary (from the blues of the same name). Incidently, I knew that a loblolly boy was a ship's surgeon's assistant from reading the Patrick O'Brian novels (16 down, 4 to go) which provided the source material for the "Master and Commander" movie with Russell Crowe.
We were, indeed, deeply saddened not to have your company.
I had to catch a rat yesterday--Theodore Rattsevelt escaped from his temporary home. Fortunately, he didn't hide from me, and certainly didn't bite; he ran over and waited for me to grab him.
I suspect there are better methods for catching rats in the wild, even with Victorian technology.