Being Elsewhere

Loretta reports:

I have no report. With apologies, there will be no Nerdy History Girl blog post from me today, because it's too late at night to pretend to be intelligent about history. This is because I didn't come back soon enough from where I was away to. Instead I offer all the preceding prepositions in places some people will say are wrong.

And the pictures are from where I was late coming back from, on the Maine coast in paradise. So maybe you won't blame me for not hurrying back.

Still Working, But We'll Be Back Soon

Fuseli, The Nightmare

Loretta & Susan report:

No, our books are not yet done, which is why you haven’t seen a blog post in some time. 

The good news is, the finish line is in view, even if the view is kind of blurry at the moment—though that might be due to lack of sleep or brain fatigue.

We apologize for the overlong blank stretch—believe us, it hasn’t been a holiday, by any means, and the picture doesn't exaggerate. We thank you for your patience and for all the kind words and positive thoughts you’ve sent our way.

If all goes reasonably well, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled blogging by the second week of February, if not sooner.

Image: John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781), from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts
 
Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Breakfast Links On Ice

Isabella reporting,

I hate to deliver the sorrowful news to all you Breakfast Links fans, but this week there will be no fresh links, due to the winter weather.

Obviously I jinxed myself with that blog about the Great Blizzard of 1888. I've had no power, no heat, and no internet since a winter ice storm on Tuesday night dumped a delightful mix of sleet and freezing rain on top of the Sunday night storm's nine inches of snow, left. The ice on top of the weighty wet snow took out power lines and trees (including my poor 70-year-old pink crabapple tree) across the Philadelphia area. With over 750,000 houses and businesses in the dark - mostly in my county - this has been the region's worst storm-related outage since Hurricane Sandy. Misery does love company, I suppose, but it's hard to be companionable when the temperature is below freezing inside your house.

But enough about ice. If the absence of a fresh edition of Breakfast Links seems too much to bear, please consider a visit to some of our older links - look to the "Labels" list to the left, click on Breakfast Links, and you'll have thousands of older links to explore.

Hope to be back next week!

Another Brief Hiatus, or, Gone Workin'

Gypsy Rose Lee

Loretta & Isabella report:

For some stupid reason, we Two Nerdy History Girls are still working for a living, rather than living the life of leisure in Pick-Your-Expensive-Luxurious-Leisure-Location.

Gypsy Rose Lee makes writing look glamorous.  Pretend we’re glamorous, too, as we polish our beautiful prose and deliver our manuscripts right on time.

Or take a look at the other photograph, where Ms. Miller's facial expression, if not her attire, approaches nearer the reality.

In other words, we’re writing and researching madly, and thus need, once again, to take some time off from blogging.  Look for fresh posts about old stuff toward the end of the month.

Flora Payne Whitney Miller

Photos courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.  Clicking on captions will take you to their LOC information page.

A Brief Recess

Loretta & Isabella reporting,

It's that time again – when stars collide, and our deadlines do, too. There are some writers who plan and plot carefully in advance, so that deadlines offer no terrors for them. We, alas, are not among that group.

We're going to take a week off from blogging & tweeting to write furiously on our books, so that we, like the writing lady, left, will one day have cupids deliver crowns of laurels to us. We promise we'll be back here at the blog next Sunday night, with lots of fresh historical delights. Many thanks for understanding!

Laurels for the lady writer, S. Wale delin.; B.Torand sculp. London c. 1750. From the collection of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Breakfast links broken

Lady Morgan by René Berthon

Loretta & Isabella/Susan report:

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we're unable to bring you breakfast links this week.  We hope to soon return to our normally-scheduled blogging.

We are experiencing technical difficulties

Sorry.

Please stay tuned.

Or come back soon...

The Dog Ate Our Breakfast Links!

Susan reporting:

Well, okay,so  the dog didn't really eat this week's links (though he sure looks as if he did, left, doesn't he?)

But Evil and Mysterious Things did happen to my server, which has stubbornly refused to accomplish the cut/paste/repeat quick-step that creates the Breakfast Links. I'm sorry about this – I know the Links have become a Sunday morning habit with many of you – but I'll try to get the problem solved, and will post on Sunday night instead. Arrrggghhh....

Left: Pug Dog in an Armchair by Alfred Dedreux 

Downed by Nor'easter

Loretta reports:
October snowstorm - downed trees, downed wires, downed Internet equals no blog. Sorry.  Back ASAP.

Happy Second Anniversary to Us (plus More About That Hurricane)

Susan & Loretta reporting:

Somehow or another, we've managed to reach the second anniversary of the Two Nerdy History Girls, and we can't quite believe it. We began the blog to entertain one another, and with the hope that there might be a few other nerdy-history-folk out there who might like to join us for the ride. To our amazement, there turned out to be a great many of you: we have 582 members through Blogger and 1740 followers on Twitter. Most astonishing of all is that, over the last two years, we've had over 300,000 page views! We're celebrating, yes, but we're raising our glasses to you, too. Many, many thanks for making our success possible, and we hope you'll continue to be part of the party.

As for Hurricane Irene: as Loretta noted on Monday, Irene raged, and Susan's electricity meekly gave in. Here in my corner of Pennsylvania, we were lucky not to have the heartbreaking damage that this storm has caused in other regions, but we did loose a good many large trees that seemed determined to use power lines to break their fall. The tree, right, fell near enough to my house to knock out my neighborhood's electricity over the weekend, and we didn't have our power restored until yesterday morning.

As a result, the TNHG have been silent on Twitter over the last few days, and the Breakfast Links never had a chance.  But we're back tweeting again, and, weather willing, look for a fresh helping of Breakfast Links this Sunday. Whew!

We had this hurricane

Loretta & Susan report:

You may have noticed a lack of Breakfast Links and a lingering post from Friday.

As some have probably guessed, we're experiencing Hurricane Irene-related technical difficulties.  We'll be back to normal blogging as soon as we can.

Illustration: Currier & Ives, Pilot boat in a storm.  Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

Blogger Shenanigans

As much as we like exploring the past, there are times when modern life rudely intrudes, and that's what happened from early Thursday morning well into Friday.

This blog (and zillions of others) are posted via Blogger, and what apparently began as the dreaded "routine maintenance" for Blogger blossomed into something far worse. We don't begin to understand the technical explanations, but we do know that we couldn't post and you couldn't comment, that links went dead and followers were sent older posts in their morning mail.

Fortunately everything now seems to be back as it should be, and we're sorry for any confusion caused by the Blogger meltdown. We like to think that this drawing of famous Regency entertainer Joseph Grimaldi, left, pretty much sums up what must have happened somewhere deep in tech-land late Wednesday night.

Left: Joseph Grimaldi as Clown Joey, 1820

Blog taking a short recess

As happens more than you'd suppose, both Nerdy History Girls have deadlines looming at the same time.

Since one of us can't fill in for the other, we will, for the next few days, be blogging only sporadically, if at all, and writing desperately so that our editors don't hate us and cast us out upon the cruel world to find a real job.

Please bear with us—and expect our regularly scheduled blogging to recommence on Sunday, with new, fresh breakfast links!

The end better be near

Loretta reports:

Though Susan and I don’t live in the same dormitory or even the same state, we both get our deadlines at the same time. That would be now. Call us crazy but we thought it might be a good idea to devote the next few days to finishing our books.

This means we don’t expect to be posting this week. It might happen but don’t count on it. We might put up some amusing pictures, if we can see straight.

Otherwise, just imagine us up all night in front of our computers, fighting with the writing gods and hoping our editors don’t yell at us too much.

The Dog Ate Our Blog!

More precisely, the dog ate our List of Blogs We Read.

We woke this morning to find it gone, and though we searched high and low, it seems to have truly vanished. Of course we did not make a back-up, because we're Nerdy History Girls, not Nerdy Tech-Savvy Girls, and these things happen. To us, anyway.

So if your blog was one of the ones that vanished, please don't feel cheesed or put out with us. We just goofed, and we promise to rebuild our list, once we can get it back from this *&^%$ dog.

Pug Dog in an Armchair by Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) Ain't he a beaut?