1. Gah! Has anyone else had the 24-hour stomach flu that’s going around? Mr. Isbell had it Sunday and I told him it had to be food poisoning, since it came and went so fast. Well, my disbelief was punished—I came down with it yesterday at lunch. I’m just glad it does move fast. I might even try to eat a cracker later.

2. I will wash my windows tomorrow, when I am recovered. No excuses. It’s getting hard for Toby to see the birds out of them.

3. From an archived interview (now online) with Ernest Hemingway on how he approached symbolism in his books: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”