Lovely Day

Hoy dia yo fui al Library of Congress in Washington D.C. with my friend and her friend, history/art history students at George Mason U. I checked out a rare (to me anyway, though it is not technically in the "Rare Books" collection) volume that I had checked out more than 10 years ago. I found the old order slip in it, which even had my father's signature on it from when he lived in Virginia. He had to come with me because I was still too young to check out books from the Library of Congress. That was a trip, finding that slip. I guess that not very many people have looked at that book over the past 10 years...

The book was a biography of a 19th century writer named George MacDonald. It was written by his son and it is called George MacDonald and his wife. I spent most of my time reading/skimming it. (When I was younger I was mainly looking in it for photographs because I knew he was friends with Lewis Carroll, who was a photographer, and I was doing a report in my photography class).

Part of the reason I was reading it was I knew that this author had lead a bit of a rags to riches existence (to a degree) and I wanted to find out how he'd done it. Well, it seems that he'd occasionally attract the attention of well-off individuals (like Lady Byron for example). These individuals then provided him with money, and in turn, he wrote many books and gave lectures until at some point, after many years a whole bunch of people (and fans of his work) pooled together money and he got a big house in Italy. And by friends and fans, I mean...a Princess here, a Baroness there...I believe his wife and daughters mostly took care of the house...but maybe there were servants, too. It also said that even some former servants contributed money toward the family buying this house.

So. Thats one way to do it...

Also, I checked out The Triple Goddess Tarot (even the cards came with the book!) and a book about The Herbal Tarot. Also a book in Italian (which I cannot really read) about Elisabetta Sirani, a female painter in the Renaissance, and some books about Isabel Clara Eugenia, the daughter of Philip II of Spain, which were either in Spanish (which I can read) or Dutch (which I can't). Except for the tarot books, I didn't look at those very much but the whole point was, these are all materials you can't check out of any local library I've been to recently! Being in close proximity to D.C. has its advantages.(But, soon I shall make a journey to see family and seek employment in a colder, more Northern state of Michigan...That is, as soon as I figure out what to do about my car, which has a bad transmission, according to not-1-not-2-not-3-but-4 sources!)

There was a small fire(?) in the LOC today, and people were briefly evacuated out of the building, but it didn't seem to do any serious damage.