Today (with a little help from Pepys)

This morning up by sun-rise, at 7 o’clock, then to break fast with my woman, to Division Street to Barnes & Noble, to meet Lords Anderson, Balsy, Boltuck, Corliss, Davis, Lundquist, & Yoos  at the Starbuck, but they not being come as appointed, I returned to The Medieval Machine by Jean Gimpel and to drink my morning decafinated draft, and there I heard of a fray between the two Embassadors of Spain and France; and that, this day, being the day of the entrance of an Embassador from Sweden, they intended to fight for the precedence! Our King, I heard, ordered that no Englishman should meddle in the business,1 but let them do what they would. And to that end all the soldiers in the town were in arms all the day long, and some of the train-bands in the City; and a great bustle through the City all the day.

As kids, we thought old people's frequent talk about their surgeries was about splinter removal, i. e. sterilizing a sewing needle with alcohol and/or a lighted match, digging into the wounded finger, prying the splinter up so it was accessible to tweezers, and finally choosing between mercurochrome which didn't sting and iodine which did. Now as an elder, I know they were talking about cancer.

Chicken soup with calendar picture

Mocha (Peru) ceramic bottle, 3rd-5th century/