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The lip’s still a bit sore because it got so shredded a week ago, but the cold sore lump is gone, and so is that feeling you get when one is ripening. I took a couple of extra L-Lysine capsules both days, and it works its usual magic. The label claims it strengthens the immune system, and maybe that’s why. All I can say is that it works for me on cold sores.

Since I couldn’t think of a relevant photo this time, I’ll post another of Bill’s creations: his lead-filled baseballs. He just finished another. For the first ones, he made cores of lead shot embedded in silicone, but apparently he didn’t think they weighed enough. Now he casts cores of molten lead. The covers, as always, are leather cut to a standard baseball pattern. He sits in his recliner, watching TV and stitching them two-handed with curved needles, in a proper baseball stitch, like somebody doing their knitting. They weigh about 4 pounds each, I think. When done, he dips them in wax, then shines them. In the photo, the back two have been dipped and are dry, and the front one has been polished. He signs and numbers them, too.

Remember, from 2-4 pm on Saturday, Nov. 29, I’ll be at Mitchell’s Coffee House with my books. Not only The Girl Who Talked Too Much, but also American Governess, the story of my year living with a Count and Countess in Bavaria. I’ll also have my poetry chapbooks available; Awakening, Poems of a Marionette Who Cut the Strings, and The Only Sweet I Crave.

The Farmers’ Market should still be going on, and Mitchell’s has lots of yummies and great coffee, so there’s lots going on. See you there, I hope!

Things have been hectic, and I have a lot to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day! Yesterday morning, a misstep on my morning walk sent me into a faceplant on the sidewalk 15 minutes from home. There wasn’t a soul in sight, and I was grateful to be able to pick myself up and stand, finding that I was bloody (split lip, cuts to left cheekbone and brow) but unbroken. At my age, it’s wonderful to be able to say that after a full-length fall onto concrete. I walked home at my normal pace, keeping the bleeding under control with a tissue i had in my pocket.

Once there, my dear husband took over, making me lie down with ice packs, checking that the pupils of my eyes were reactive. By the time I got to my son’s for an early holiday dinner that evening, some of the guests didn’t realize what had happened. Today I’ve got bruises blooming and random aches, but I’m happy at the outcome. One more feast tomorrow with relatives (for which I spent the afternoon baking) will round out the holiday.

This Saturday, the 29th, I’ll be signing books at Mitchell’s Coffee House from 2 to 4 pm, and I hope some of you will drop in and see me. I hope I don’t scare people if the bruises get worse. I think they make me look rakish.

This photo is of Mother with Kippy in 1970, at the wheel of the Stella Solaris, a cruise ship which took them to Central America. Read about them in The Girl Who Talked Too Much!

My sister Kippy, title character in my book, The Girl Who Talked Too Much, loved going to the beach, and she loved my friend Karen. Here they are enjoying a moment after my son Dirk’s informal wedding on a Florida Gulf beach.

Come to Mitchell’s Coffee House this coming Saturday from 2-4 for my book-signing. Besides The Girl Who Talked Too Much, I’ll have my other work, American Governess and two poetry chapbooks.

Even during the winter, when the water was a bit too cool, Kippy, The Girl Who Talked Too Much, loved to walk on the Florida Gulf coast beach. Here, she’s somewhere south of Sarasota

When my grandfather was an Intern at Brooklyn Hospital in 1902, he served as Ambulance Surgeon for the first six months. He was called to the 49th Precinct to bandage the arm of this woman who looks extremely irritated about being there. He recorded that he stitched and bandaged a laceration, but did not explain more, so we’re left to speculate why she was arrested.

It was during this time that he met my grandmother, who was training as a nurse, and became Head Operating Room nurse the following year, a story you can follow in my new book, The Girl Who Talked Too Much.

Mark your calendars for November 29, when I’ll be having a book signing at Mitchell’s Coffee House downtown. Come in for delicious coffee and yummies, and take a look at my books.

She’s the second nurse in from the right, a petite young woman who, by the next year became Head Operating Room Nurse at Brooklyn Hospital. Notice that the nurses wore a square of gauze cloth, folded and tied on their heads instead of caps. She hated that, and designed a nurses’ cap that was adopted by the hospital a year or two later.

In this photo, three surgeons are reconstructing the patient’s right hand. The anesthesiologist is seen at the head of the patient, manipulating the ether cone. I was amused to see that the doctors are using the patient as a table for their instruments, as I know has been done with me a time or two.

My grandmother was 25, and had come from Bermuda alone to train as a nurse. She later married a doctor she met at the hospital. She was a British subject, but acquired American citizenship as well as a result of her marriage. Read her story in my new book, The Girl Who Talked Too Much.

Quite a capable woman, and yet neither she nor any other woman in this country had the right to vote in elections until 1920, when the 19th amendment was passed.