1. Happy birthday, Marcel Proust, born in 1871 today.
2. Complaining about mosquito bites on my face yesterday reminded me of Little House on the Prairie, in which the entire family ends up getting malaria* one summer:
In the daytime there were only one or two mosquitoes in the house. But at night, if the wind wasn’t blowing hard, mosquitoes came in thick swarms…Pa could not play the fiddle at night because so many mosquitoes bit him…And in the morning Laura’s forehead was speckled with mosquito bites.
That’s actually a pretty terrible chapter, with the whole family sick and Pa passed out on the floor and Jack the bulldog upset and unable to help. Just another reason to be thankful for tonic water and DEET.
3. *In the book, Laura calls it “fever ‘n ague.” I’ll probably never hear that second word used in conversation in my life.