This city is full of graffiti and architectural decoration, both of those things being equally delightful. Its buildings crowd together like dogs on a cold night; its streets are skinny as pipe-leg jeans. Its people are stoic and a little intimidating, but if they do eventually smile it is charming as all get out. Its beer is delicious. Its potato dumplings are even more so.

Everything is worth looking at. Good thing we’ve got time.

We’re leaving for Prague tonight, and several good omens have already occurred: As we were walking up Woodlawn to run some pre-trip errands, a siren-ing ambulance passed on the left. A moment later, the beautiful husky with notes of coffee in its coat that we sometimes say hello to on that street lifted its whole head and howled in a deeply resonant echo of its wolfy ancestors and the distress of the day. I realize that this might not seem like a good omen to everyone, but it did to me.

The other day, I heard (and we both saw) the first cardinal of the year, on the Midway.

Zheli has been making motions to wave goodbye to us with her foot, so I’m not too worried about her.

Sometimes I go to make a post here and I remember those of you to whom I owe emails, and I think, “Should I refrain from posting, so that they don’t feel indignant that I am posting instead of writing them emails?”

And then I look at the post I am making and realize that no one could possibly want to receive the email I would end up writing with this brain, this moment.

Please remind me not to spend an hour reading emails from my early twenties when life was dramatic and I was poetic. It will only end with me suddenly looking up amidst the fog of memory and realizing that I haven’t written a word of the thing I was supposed to write, and it’s not as if I have very much time to work these days anyway, since the cat has trained me exquisitely well to scratch the sides of her head every time she wakes up from a nap, which is approximately fifty times a day.

Thank you.

I was sitting at my table in the bird preparation lab this morning, sewing up a small Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, when a member of the maintenance staff at the museum poked his head out of one of the side rooms next to the lab, where he’d been working.

“Excuse me. Excuse me?”

It took me a while to turn around, partly because sewing up a bird is close work, and partly because while I am in the lab I usually feel like such a tenderfoot that I imagine I must exude an air of complete ignorance, and who would ask me a question? But turn around I eventually did.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, but what’s that hanging in there?” He pointed inside the room.

“Huh?”

“What’s hanging in there?”

“Um—I don’t know, actually—I haven’t been in there.” But by this time I had swiveled around in my chair and gotten up, because if I’d learned anything in my time at the museum so far it was that whatever was hanging in that room today was going to be something I wanted to see.

“It’s a wolf,” said Dave, the head of collections. He came over from the other side of the lab, grinning. Dave led the maintenance guy in, and I followed.

People, I don’t know if you have lived until you have had a day on which serendipity affords you the sight of the skinned carcass of a wolf hanging like a magnificent totem of death from the ceiling. Apparently the unfortunate beast was shot by a moron living in Minnesota, who claims to have mistaken it for a coyote. (The wolf was at least as long as Ross is tall; no coyote it.) It had been recently skinned by a member of the mammal department, and its hide was being prepared to be stuffed. Because they didn’t have enough room for the carcass in the mammal rooms at the moment, the rest of the wolf was drying out in our lab until it was ready for the Dermestids. At the end, the museum would have both a skeleton and a skin, each a fascinating and instructive remnant of the animal.

The wolf was gorgeous: sleek, a deep ruby red, made all of muscle laid out in curvilinear lines, and very recognizable. If its skull hadn’t been obscured by the edge of the sink it was hanging over, I’m certain the maintenance guy would have recognized it immediately.

As I sewed up my tiny bird, smaller than my own right hand, I was filled with tremendous admiration: for the wolf itself, yes, and also for the people whose skill would give it a respectful, wondrous scientific legacy.

Today was warm, wet, muddy—winter wearing its spring coat. We opened the window in the kitchen a few inches while we were cooking, and I picked Zheli up in my arms to let her sniff the breeze that stole in. She nosed it like someone meeting a friend she wasn’t sure she recognized, quiet and curious and a little bit, I don’t know how to explain it exactly, like a child. I decided to move the jars of lentils and chillies and seeds off to the right of the sill, so that she’d have room to hop up on it if she wanted, and not a moment later there she was, head so far under the edge of the window that she was on the verge of getting wedged in. For half an hour or so she sat on the sill, watching and smelling that vast March night on the other side of the gap, not tense with excitement as she so often is, but deeply calm; she could have been hypnotized. Every now and then she turned around to call softly at me, a tiny mew full of wonder and uncertainty, like Have you smelled this? When she did so I could see that there was a smudge of dirt on the tip of her nose from the dirty sill. She looked very like a stray cast member from a stage production of Oliver Twist.

The other night I had a dream that three short essays I submitted to a literary journal were summarily rejected by email; the editor, whose tone was outraged, called them “cruel and degrading.” In the dream I understood this to mean not that their content was sordid, but that they were so wretchedly badly written as to render him mortified. I have not, as it happens, submitted anything to a literary journal lately, but when I awoke I knew why I had had that dream. I am working, as ever, to fulfill some kind of promise. Some days it is hard to tell whether it is a promise I made to myself, or one that was made to me. Either way, it is taking far longer than I had anticipated, and it is easy to grow discouraged.

On the other hand, the simple act of opening a window and making a little room for a cat on the sill is far more gratifying than anyone (but me) will ever tell you.

After another volunteer showed me a couple of things today, I did a tremendously improved job on the two bird study-skins I prepared: a blackbird and another starling. There is still a really long way to go; my tremendous improvement means only that the birds did not turn out looking entirely as if they’d just been chewed on mightily by a cat. Nevertheless, I felt really proud. And when I got home I was able to explain my achievements to Ross in great detail (and over dinner). I am lucky it is hard to gross him out.