Journal of a Sabbatical

November 16, 1999

definite flurries

Today's Reading: Wild Fruits by Henry David Thoreau

Once again I slept long and feverishly, but miraculously I woke up feeling like a normal person. Well, normal for some values of normal I guess. I mean I'm still me, which probably doesn't qualify me for status as a normal person, but I am back to the non-fevered, non-chilled, non-achy state.

We've been having snow flurries all day and the wind is blowing fiercely again so it feels even colder than it is. The weather report keeps predicting a chance of flurries. I'd say it's a 100% chance.

My big outing for the day was the lecture tonight at the Peabody Museum of Archeology about King Philip's war club. The first half hour involved standing on the steps in the freezing cold waiting for somebody from the museum with a key to let us in.

The speaker was from the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard (the town, not the university) where the object known as King Philip's war club resides. No, we didn't get to see the actual club, just some slides. The club is safely in the museum, having been stolen once and missing for years until it was found at a tag sale in Worcester and returned to the museum.

King Philip's war club has nothing to do with King Philip's War and probably didn't even belong to King Philip. It is an interesting artifact though, and definitely from the 17th century. It's got rows of purple wampum from quahogs and white wampum from whelks glued on with pitch. Fascinating even if King Philip (a.k.a. Metacom) was never anywhere near it.

My other exciting outing for the day was trip to the local walk-in clinic to pay $61 to confirm that the itchy spot on my right wrist is, you guessed it, ringworm. How the hell did I get ringworm? It's right in the exact spot where Chloe scratched me last week and I did wash dishes from the ringworm room that day, but I was pretty careful. Grrr.