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Back home again after two weeks of sickness, death and funeral and I'm having trouble, as always after this sort of experience, easing back into regular life.

I'm sure all of you have been through something similar can understand.

I have 2015 resolutions but they sound rather banal I think: organize, create, be brave, be strong.

And eat better, of course.

I am reviewing YA SFF this year for Locus and continuing with aviation articles for Alaska Dispatch News. I broke into LARB last fall and have another review piece to finish and submit this month (on MG/YA nonfiction). I'd like to break in someplace else with some personal essays but nothing concrete to share on that score yet.

And of course, still and always Booklist.

The book is still in research phase. It's a very personal project, (about my ancestors as I have shared in the family history posts here), and I want to get it right. It's a time-consuming subject but I've gotten further along than I ever imagined. Right now I have to work on a marriage I never knew occurred in 1919 and gathering info on an asylum commitment in 1940. I love this project and I want it to succeed. Mostly, this year I just want to keep at it and continue to move forward with it.

I don't want to waste this year in talking about writing, like so many of us do.

There is nothing revolutionary about my 2015 hopes and dreams; just work. I want this year to be about work.

Finally, some sad news here - Ray Bradbury's house has been torn down. He lives forever in his stories and books but man, it's sad to think that the floors he walked for so long have disappeared.

Between my website and the email automatically forwarded to me from Guys Lit Wire, I have been averaging about 150 emails a day for a very long time and it is completely insane. I scan through my inbox every morning and delete with abandon, my junk mail is even worse. (I wish I could ignore the junk mail but a couple of times a week real mail ends up in there so I have to check it at least every few days.)

Email is a stupid thing to worry about but when it's there everyday it becomes a burden and when I can't tell what is good and what isn't, my day just ends up starting with an annoyance. So, I decided a couple of weeks ago to start trying to get off some of the zillion mailing lists that I somehow got put on without my knowledge.

My daily goal was really tiny: just open 5 emails and unsubscribe. I figured out pretty quickly that a lot of emails are from the same lists, and also that unsubscribing is not that tough. I was able to get through my five often in just a couple of minutes. Some days that was all I did and I still felt like I accomplished something which was huge.

At least I wasn't just passively accepting all this crap everyday.

Some of the lists respond that it takes 5-7 days to be removed, others say it takes as long as 10 days. Because of that I don't think I'll get a really good idea of how successful I've been until the end of the month. By then, hopefully, I will be left with only the real junk (the Nigerian prince emails, etc.) and then I plan to blacklist those and see if I can outright block them.

I am really puzzled how I ended up on all these list. Several of them involve wine, which I don't drink and haven't ordered. Bloomberg News and the Economist like me a lot - several lists from each of them and again, no idea why. I also get a lot of stuff from people selling window blinds and hair replacement treatments.

WTF?

Today, I am down to 45 emails a day total. Since I doubt I spent 45 minutes of my time getting down to this, I think I've been pretty successful. I'm not done yet, but at least I don't feel angry every time I check my email which is huge.

Ending 2014 this way is actually a pretty good thing to do. Between the e-hoarding and the email, I feel like I'm cleaning up my computer life quite a bit. This week I start on the bookmarks with the same tactic - looking at 5 a day minimum and either deleting or organizing them into folders. I have no idea what I'm going to find but at least this is all stuff I definitely wanted at some point which is a huge improvement over the email.

It's the little things, right? *grin*

I have decided to get actually serious about redesigning my website and streamlining it in a major way.* I want to lighten it up, brighten it up and find some focus here. I was honestly thinking about suspending the blog for a bit but I need the website for my book and I do enjoy writing about my family history here, so I just decided a change might do the trick.

And then I had to face my e-hoarding issues.

I archive a lot here. I archive all my posts but also, until very recently, copy all all of my reviews and major articles as well. There is a lot of stuff backed up on Chasing Ray that is more about my paranoia of suddenly disappearing from the internet (it's insane, I know) then actually needing to be here.

It has to go.

So, just like we clean out our closets, I am cleaning up my website. I'm not going to worry about deleting everything, but more importantly, I'm not going to worry about copying everything here in the future. I'm going to put up my posts and if I think the world might like to know about an article or review then I'll link to it and that will be enough. And if something disappears from the internet then I need to LET IT GO.

It's like clinging to clothes from high school; embarrassing and stupid and not who I want to be (or how I want to live).

The thing about e-hoarding is that no one else can see it. No one knows about the dead bookmarks I have, or old articles cluttering my hard drive, and few even wander around the web site enough to see those reviews from forever ago. But I know and I can't stand it. I want it all gone and I want the compulsion that makes me keep all this junk gone as well.

It's a little change in the grand scheme of things but a bright one and in the midst of winter, bright things are always good. :)

*This means that I am happily paying Sarah Stevenson to redesign my website as I can't write code to save my life. Thank goodness she knows what she is doing.

This is my dog Hondo who died on Friday.

If you have ever been through it then you know what it's like to sit in the vet's office as your pet is diagnosed with an incurable disease. You start with the pain medication and you watch him limp and first he is just the same except for the limp but then he is slower to stand, slower to sit. He eats a little less and then sometimes, doesn't want to eat at all. He used to follow you everywhere you go and now he only does part of the time. He sleeps more but does not sleep well; he is restless. And you increase the pain medication and you entice with food that he loves and you lavish all the love in the world upon him and then you realize it's over; it's time.

He's telling you it is time.

And so you make the appointment and you go to the vet and they are all so sad because they love him too and you sit and you hold his head and he looks at you and he trusts you and he knows you will never ever do him wrong and you tell the vet to do it and just like that, in a moment, he is gone.

And eight years was really far too short.

Hondo had bone cancer. There was little we could do although we did as much as we could. I have been to the vet for a visit like this before, for Jake, (my Florida-born husky/shepherd/doberman mix who went north with me), who died in 2003 and for Tucker, (my Fairbanks-born Black Lab who came south with me), who died in 2007. Hondo was from an animal shelter in Washington State, a mix of German Shepherd, Black Lab and Rottweiler (we think) who was found on the side of the road with his mother and litter mates. He was the kindest dog I have ever known, a good dog in the purest sense of the world.

Of course, like every dog I have ever loved, he was special.

What I realized last night though, is that more than anything Hondo is the dog that I have written with. Late at night, after everyone else has gone to bed, Hondo sat with me while I put The Map of My Dead Pilots together. He was at my feet (always at my feet), with his paws wrapped around the chair legs, as I worked the rewrites my agent requested, then worked the rewrites my editor requested and then, finally, finished my book.

At the dining room table, writing essays and articles, Hondo was at my feet. If I got up and moved, downstairs to get a book I needed, into my office in search of a stray paper, he came with me. All the words that I produced that matter in the past 7+ years were with Hondo and now his loss to every aspect of my life is nearly overwhelming.

Writers always have rituals: you have the cup of tea in that mug, the plate of snacks arranged just so, the special writing desk or chair or notebook. You write in your office or the corner of your bedroom or out on the deck or in a backyard writing hut. You listen to certain music; you have an old movie that plays in the background. There are things that you do every time you write, habits that are part and parcel of the process. For me, Hondo was my writing companion, the one who heard the words before they were smooth, the one who stood up to urge a break, the one who patiently listened as I whined and complained my way through a stubborn paragraph. The words came with Hondo, they made sense with Hondo, they worked with Hondo and now I have no one to hear my words.

He was my dog, and I loved him. He was my friend and I mourn him. He was my heart and I can not imagine a world, or a word, without him.

My dog Hondo died on Friday, and I miss him very much.

Hondo at about 3 months old, the day we brought him home, July 2006.

bereft: adj. sad because a family member or friend has died

I caught these two [very different] film trailers the other day and both appealed to me for different reasons. First, Redwood Highway starring Shirley Knight and Tom Skerritt is about retaking control of your life after everyone else has, apparently, decided you should be put out to pasture. Take a look:

I have been a fan of Knight & Skerritt's forever so the chance to see them together makes this one I will seek out. (Likely not in the theater around here, but I'll get it one way or another.) (Remember Pickett Fences? Skerritt was sublime in that series!)

And then we have one of those always fun "return to summer camp" films: Camp Takota. I don't know why I find these so appealing; my only summer camp experience was a very dismal Christian day camp when I was around 9 or 10 years old where the crafts were dull, the lifeguards criminally negligent (how dozens of us didn't drown I'll never know) and the bathrooms...well, you can guess. Maybe it's wish fulfillment, but this just looks like right sort of sarcastic rip on young adulthood that will ring as extremely familiar to many of us. Take a peek:

I am seriously daydreaming about Christmas right now.

I know that it's fashionable to hate on the holiday madness and we're also supposed to be on one side or the other of "Happy Holidays" vs "Merry Christmas" but I love them both. (Go ahead, tick me off and I'll scream "Season's Greetings" at you while juggling a nativity scene.)

I just feel like watching endless schmaltzy movies where there is snow and shopping and mistaken identities that lead to romance. I also want to see puppies with red ribbons and jingle bells around their necks and trees covered in snow.

I have no idea why this is happening right now, I'm just sharing it with you so you can surf the madness with me.

I'm preparing to hang ornaments from the lamp over our dining room table and struggling to resist putting part of the decorations up on the mantle. Has anyone filled a vase with a vase with ornaments for the middle of the table? Does it only look good in magazines?

I have no time for this early (EARLY) season madness! I should not be looking for the holiday cds and reaching for Miracle on 34th Street right now. I have about 8 books to review (really) and a couple of articles to work on. Plus some other writing which might be something I can do something with or not. I just need to work it and find out. (I really really want to get those pieces done.)

Somehow, I need to accomplish all this while stringing beads, writing Christmas cards, sipping hot chocolate and listening to the Ally Macbeal Christmas cd. (You did know that Robert Downy Jr. can sing didn't you? Listen to him sing Joni Mitchell's "River" and you will kind of fall in love. Seriously.)

Excuse me now while I go wrap a few gifts. (Most of them are books, really really fabulous books. I'll give a full report of what I bought after the holidays.)

We've spent a lot of time at Children's Hospital in Seattle over the years. This video is everything about how tough and sad and hopeful and amazing these places can be. (Plus, that girl in the tie-dye shirt is a rock star. For real.)

Offered without comment other than YESSSSSSSSS!

More from io9:

Okay, this is just awesome. One Redditor photoshopped the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation into the original series uniforms, and the results are amazing.

All of our love to deadfraggle and their delightful photoshopping skills, mainly because we want more more more more more. Let's add Wesley Crusher, Tasha Yar (in a dress!!!) Guinan and The Traveler. We beg you, do them all! Please!

Read about the creator's decision behind certain colors for certain characters here.

.........go read her piece in the New York Times about choosing a preventative mastectomy. It's stunning and sobering and braver than anything I've read in a long long time. I'm tired of pink ribbons making us all feel better - we need to cure cancer and we need to do it now.

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options.

Just when you thought the British couldn't top finding Richard III under a parking lot, they seem to have uncovered an actual knight!!!!

Archaeologists who were on hand during the construction of a new building in Edinburgh uncovered a carved sandstone slab, decorated with markers of nobility -- a Calvary cross and a sword. Nearby, the team found an adult skeleton, which is thought to have once occupied the grave. Scientists plan to analyze the bones and teeth to learn more about this possible knight or nobleman.

"We hope to find out more about the person buried in the tomb once we remove the headstone and get to the remains underneath, but our archaeologists have already dated the gravestone to the thirteenth century," Richard Lewis, a member of the City of Edinburgh Council, said in a statement.

And over in London, they are apparently overflowing with historical graves:

Seven centuries after their demise, the skeletons of 12 plague victims have been unearthed in the City of London, a find which archaeologists believe to be just the tip of a long-lost Black Death mass burial ground.

Arranged in careful rows, the bodies were discovered 2.5 metres below the ground in Charterhouse Square in works for a Crossrail tunnel shaft beside the future ticketing hall for Farringdon station.

Tests are needed to confirm the skeletons' provenance, but the discovery should shed more light on life and death in 14th-century Britain and help scientists to understand how the plague mutated.

While the first story made me think of Indiana Jones, the second has brought thoughts of Poltergeist to mind. I'm quite worried about some kind of mash-up happening in my brain at any moment. This does not make me happy.

*Title totally copped from Jenny D. whose link brought me to the Black Plague article. It was too good not to use here. :)

John Lennon forever, but man - Melissa Etheridge nails this song.

Happiest of holidays to all of you, forever.

....to say that all is well and apologies for light posting but I have been swept up lately in holiday [semi]madness. All packages should be winging their ways to relatives everywhere by the weekend (well, most of them anyway) and calm shall be restored. Posts are forthcoming on science book recs, my favorite reads this year and Stephanie LaCava's lovely memoir.

Plus other stuff - more soonest!!! (In the meantime - do check out the December issue of Bookslut with a host of amazing titles in my column and a feature on coffee table book recs for teens - and a few for the younger set.)

...and will be posting next week, promise! HIghlights of my last week include gold panning, urban exploring, making more than one wicked cool discovery in the woods, visiting the site of a vanished mining town, hitting the stacks for a ton of research and sled dog puppies!

Don't you wish you were with me? :)

There are days - weeks - months - when you just figure the universe is out to get you and that is all there is to it.

In September we left our 20 year old F150 at Master Park in Seattle and came back a few days later from Providence to discover that the steel rod behind the dashboard connecting the gear shift (which is on the column) was broken in half. Master Park asserts it was "wear and tear" because "people like us" who own older vehicles have them spontaneously break all the time. They were unable to start the truck when we left it and had it towed. They claim the rod was either broken when we left it (which would have meant we couldn't put the truck in park but they can't explain that) or broke by itself while it was parked. It cost $600 to fix. Ford, who fixed it, said they don't know how it happened. But can't discount that old trucks break. They also can't discount that several employees pulling on the gear shift knob at once to force it from Park to Neutral wouldn't have snapped the steel rod in half as well. They won't commit one way or the other though.

So Master Park won't reimburse us. And that is the end of that.

Then someone who leased one of our aircraft refused to pay us the lease payment. And the plane was in the shop at the time and the people who owned the shop refused to release the aircraft to us until we paid the outstanding bill for the company that had been leasing it. Our plane was held hostage. So we had to pay that "ransom" to get it out so we could lease it to another company. And now we have to get lawyers involved to recoup that loss and breach of contract and everything else.

Then I ordered a refill of the test strips for my son's glucometer and received only one month's supply instead of three (as the prescription reads). The insurance company says we are dealing with a retail pharmacy and are only allowed to receive 30 days at a time. Except it is the same mail order pharmacy we have dealt with for the last 6+ years. The pharmacy says we are simply no longer allowed to have more than 30 days worth of supplies and the lady who decided this is not in the office. Not yesterday, not today, not tomorrow. Hopefully, someone else will be able to dig into her cryptic notes and figure it out tomorrow because thirty days at a time means every three weeks I'm calling to get a refill and I just don't want to deal with this all the damn time.

Plus, why do they decide this and not tell us? Why do they just do this and we have to take it while paying hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars every month for coverage? Plus, Children's Hospital just added a facility fee to all appointments of several hundred dollars. We go there a minimum of four times a year. Somehow, I doubt our insurance company is going to cover that.

And my book is coming out in three weeks and all anyone wants to ask me is what I am doing for the book and really, I thought the whole writing the book should be something, should be a lot, should be maybe even enough. But for all that you do in the writing it is nothing - absolutely worth nothing - if you want it to actually sell. I haven't written anything new in ages because all I do is deal with this book and every time I think maybe something good is happening with it I am swiftly reminded that the amount of people paying attention to my book in comparison to all the others out there is tiny. So tiny. I haven't heard from my publisher in ages. They are lovely people but probably dealing with Spring 2012 releases at this point. They have to move on. It's my job now.

And honestly, I am done.

I have had worse years than this one. 1999 was epically bad - my father died and my husband fought cancer and in the middle of it I took my oral exams for my grad degree and wrote and defended my thesis. That was a long hard year. In 2005 my son was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes at the age of three and a half and then only weeks after getting out of one hospital he was in another with pneumonia. And

I do not think Steve Jobs was perfect or heroic; I do not see a myth here but rather a man. Jobs was a brilliant and talented man and he should have lived another twenty or thirty years. He should have invented more, he should have challenged us more, he should have changed the world in many more dynamic ways.

Fifty-six is just too damn young to go away forever.

I hate cancer. I've hated it since the first time it had to be carved out of my body, since it caused my husband's throat to be cut open so he could live, since it killed my father.

I hate it.

We need to declare war on this disease and finally, once and for all, we need to kill it.

All praise John Green!

We have a very small front lawn that I am desperate to get rid of but husband cling to with a tenacity that is truly impressive. It is broken up by an embedded sandbox and a vegetable garden. The next house - as God is my witness - there will be no lawn!!!

I honestly don't know how people in Washington DC stay sane because even on the whole other side of the country our current political situation is enough to drive me over the edge. But other than writing our Congressman (which we did last night to weigh in on the balanced approach, no debt ceiling second vote next year and - as commercial aircraft owners - to rage against the tax loophole allowing corporate jet owners to have a shorter depreciation schedule than we are permitted), there isn't much I can do other than to be thoroughly depressed about the whole situation.

But man, do I so totally not need something in my life to depress me.

So yesterday we had out last dog training lesson where we learned yet again that we have done many things wrong and must work much harder at doing things right. However we do all agree that the puppy is now delightful and on the path to greatness as long as we keep things up and don't let him beat Hondo up. (Hondo used to be the big dog but we think Indy has now surpassed him weight-wise. I am frankly rather worried about getting him weighed as I think he's around 100# now.)

Standing there, trying to take everything in that I need to be doing and should stop doing and have to think about, I really kind of wanted to scream and/or cry. It would be so much easier to just not care about stupid dog training and although life would be a lot noisier (as we would be screaming at dogs a lot), at least I wouldn't have to analyze my own conduct constantly and worry that I'm doing the right thing. SIGH. Maybe I should not have pushed to get the puppy last December but I do like having two dogs and Hondo needed somebody to get him up and moving and Indy is pretty darn awesome. He's just young and big and strong. And we need to do this right. But it would be easier sometimes to imagine doing nothing at all.

On the plus side I finished reading a book for Booklist - okay but not amazing. (The book I reviewed Sun on Lake Tahoe was pretty cool though.) August column is off to Bookslut and this morning, after Forest Discovery program day one with my son (two and half hours tramping through the forest with a gaggle of kids), I will review two books for the Sept column and then pick out pictures for my MAP promotional postcards. Jenny D. had a lot of smart things to say the other day on books and publishing that I have been pondering. I also have an essay to outline on what it was like writing the book - just map out where I'm trying to go with that. (I'm hoping to get this essay published somewhere online.) (I do love writing essays more than basically anything.) It's about writing about aviation and ending up writing about my father, something I never planned to do but have now resigned myself to. In one way or another everything I write is about my family and I'm just going to have to learn to live with that.

Finally, if you missed it, Tanita writes about summer camps and Norway. She says what I don't know how to and it's beautiful and sweet and sad all at the same time. Also, the heroes who saved many of the kids on that island.

[Post pic: Brigitte Bardot at her home in Bazoches sur Guyonne by Leonard de Raemy, 1977.]

Larry Crowne has been getting walloped by several reviewers as saccharine, sweet and unrealistic about the current economic situation but at NPR Tom Hanks, makes a worthy argument about hopefulness and the reality of the community college classroom (which he attended as a teen):

"I was sitting sometimes right next to people who were twice my age," Hanks says of his time at junior college. "Mothers whose kids had gone out of the house; there were divorced guys; there were people there who were retired and taking on new jobs; there were also guys who were just back from Vietnam. "

He says that's where he developed the idea of community college as a cross-generational meeting place, something that couldn't really exist at a four-year university. And that idea stuck with him.

I taught at a community college for five years and while my classes were held on an army base and less open to a certain degree, they were filled with everyone from nineteen-year old fresh recruits using the military to help pay for college to fifty-something retirees who were taking advantage of lower tuition costs to embark on new lives. I had husbands, wives, parents, children, young adults who came from segregated southern schools (yes) and thirty-somethings who were preparing for what would come after the military. It was not at all like a typical college classroom and 100% like those portrayed in every movie and tv show about community colleges. It was wonderful and desperate and hopeful all at the same time.

Needless to say, I am very much looking forward to seeing Larry Crowne.

And please, could we just once embrace a hopeful movie where no one dies, no one blows anything up and no great big huge lessons are learned? Life is hard enough - if Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts can show me a good time (with scooters!!!) then I'm willing to take it. Heaven knows, Harry Potter is going to suck the life out of me this month. (Cowboys vs Aliens should make everything all better after that though....)

I've been deep in the final final (they swear the final) edits of my book. It has been a blur of repeated "just one more pass" emails and I have reached the point where honestly I can not bear the thought of reading my own words again. I am exhausted with this book, totally and completely.

And so I thought I would write here about other things, books read, interesting articles found, Kid Lit Con (there's a call for presentations up) and nice summerly things and then Clarence Clemons died. I have been a Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band fan my whole life - they are the band of my era, the sound of my teen years, the group that has meant more to me than any other (with the exception, perhaps, of U2). It's always been Springsteen for me and though I stayed with him for the years without the E Street Band, the band, well, if you know then you know and I don't need to explain this.

I just can't believe the Big Man is gone.

It should be past 70 degrees here today, the doors and windows will be open and it will be E Street Band music I will be blasting. And I will love every minute of it but I will be sad too because he won't be there for the next round of songs and that is just so damn wrong.

I told my son Sunday that Clarence was gone and he yelled "Nooooo!". I'm proud of that - he's 9 years old and he knows. I've done something right.

I know I have neglected this space quite a bit in the past couple of weeks but I hope you have understood - it's hard to update a blog when jumping from one family activity to another (not to mention the zoo, the beach, barbecues, and boating!). I did want to pop in though so I could report that:

1. I am still alive!!

2. I will be back to regular posting starting next Monday!

3. Also next Monday (May 2nd) the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair will launch with a wish list for a desperately needy and deserving school in Washington DC. (Watch the GLW site for info starting on Monday morning; I will also link from here.)

4. I am not reading much at all other than magazines. I have no attention span whatsoever!

5. I am going through my great grandmother's photo albums (3 of them) with my mother, removing the pictures (before the paper destroys them) and getting them in order so I can start scanning when I get home and sending them to my family. Expect many gorgeous black and white photos to be appearing here in the future. (We just received these albums upon the death of my Great Aunt Marion - we have not seen the photos in decades.)

6. Heaven help me - the Summer Blog Blast Tour is scheduled for early June. No idea how I will get my act together for that, but do plan to contribute at least an interview or two!

7. And MAP OF MY DEAD PILOTS. So much to report there - I've seen the final cover and it's amazing! I also have the massive amount of editorial notes for the manuscript and they are beyond daunting. Deadline is May 25th. I shall get it all done. I promise. For sure.

8. Expect to read many angst-ridden posts about editing in the coming weeks.

9. Florida has been fabulous. But you already figured that out, didn't you?

10. This book fair is probably the most important thing I have done in a long long time. It will be life changing for these kids and I really hope that all of you will be along for the ride. Don't let me down on this one, guys. We are going to change their world.

From the NYT, the last unknowns from the Triangle Waist fire have been identified:

Almost a century after the fire, the five women and one man, all buried in coffins under the Evergreens monument, remained unknown to the public at large, though relatives and descendants knew that a loved one had never returned from the burning blouse factory.

Now those six have been identified, largely through the persistence of a researcher, Michael Hirsch, who became obsessed with learning all he could about the victims after he discovered that one of those killed, Lizzie Adler, a 24-year-old greenhorn from Romania, had lived on his block in the East Village.

And so, for the first time, at the centennial commemoration of the fire on March 25 outside the building in Greenwich Village where the Triangle Waist Company occupied the eighth, ninth and 10th floors, the names of all 146 dead will finally be read.

My great grandmother and her younger sister both worked in garment factories (as listed in the 1910 census). I have no idea where but because of that I've always been interested in the the Triangle Waist fire. It's amazing to me that in all this time there were still six victims left unidentified. (Do read the article to see how much work it took to come up with a reliable list of victims; this is why solid hands-on research, even in the 21st century, is so important.0

[Post pic of the Trade Union procession for the victims, 1911.]

Back next week; there's someplace else I need to be.

Pardon me while I tear up:

Meanwhile, Col. Cormi Bartal, a doctor in the Israeli Army’s newly established field hospital here, pulled back the flap of a tent serving as the hospital’s pediatric section and pointed to a woman, Guerlande Jean Michel, 24. She identified a sleeping newborn on her cot, one of the first born in the city after the earthquake, and spoke in a halting voice. “This is my child,” said Ms. Jean Michel, a primary school teacher. “His name is Israel.”

Because this is a week that we will never forget, with pictures we will never forget and stories we will never forget, there is a moment needed to take a deep breath. History changes this week and as catastrophic as the earthquake is proving to be, I believe that Haiti will continue to turn a corner that has been long overdue. It wouldn't hurt if France ponied up a hell of a lot more money because god knows, they should. (Do you know the financial history between France and Haiti? Do read this quick piece at the Daily Beast to give you an idea. Then consider what would have happened to the US if the British had done this to us.)

So, because of so much sorrow here is a little bit of joy: Sam Cooke singing "Blowin' in the Wind" like no one else. Love him and adore this.

PS. Am I the only one who thought it was interesting that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie donated the same amount of money as Bank of America to quake relief? (It was 1 million dollars.) Boy, BOA wouldn't want to dip into those bonus funds, would they?

If you ever needed a reason to reconsider that cheap t-shirt, then this photo is the one. More pictures of children "born to work" at the Daily Beast. All were taken by photographer GMB Akash. His thoughts:

“My intention is not just to depict the children as victims of exploitation,” Akash writes. “I want to show the complexity of the situation: the parents who send their little boy to work in a factory because they are poor; the child who has to work to earn a living for the family; the boss of the factory who is being pushed by big garment companies to cut production costs; and the Western consumers eager for cheaper and cheaper goods.”

Consider yourselves now aware.