“Not in Hawai’i,” he said.

So consider this my Hawaiian post.

Also, I have no pants on.

Though I am wearing socks.

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Milk fever, as I remember it, followed the birth of a stillborn child. The poor mother’s unexpressed milk hardened inside her breasts, resulting in pain, swelling, infection and then death. I categorized it as a subset of childbed fever – really, puerperal fever caused by poor hygiene. (When I tried to Google it today, all I could find was a description of certain “morbid symptoms” which might appear in the week after childbirth, but which don’t appear to be fatal, and several references to a hypocalcemic condition that may affect dairy cattle, goats and dogs, and which may well be fatal if not promptly treated.)

And then today, researching something else entirely, I learned that Nancy Lincoln died of milk sickness, which was caused by snakeroot poisoning. A common affliction in the early Midwest, it occurred when cattle ate the very toxic white snakeroot, and passed the poison through in their milk.

So what about that stillborn child, I thought? That younger brother or sister whose death robbed Lincoln’s mother of life? Never existed. There was a younger brother, who died in infancy, but five or six years before Abe’s mother died. There was, however, an older sister, Sarah, called Sally, who died in childbirth at the age of 20. Her baby died, as well.

Somewhere in my mind, then, Lincoln’s mother Nancy (who might well have had milk fever after the stillbirth of Lincoln’s younger brother) and his sister Sarah morphed into a single person, buried in a grave under the poplar trees, where irises bloom in the spring. Always assuming I didn’t make that part up, too.

*And that’s something else I learned today – Lincoln didn’t grow up in Illinois at all. Now I’m wondering how many other bits of history I’ve just got wrong!

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“Is it going to bother you?” NovySan asked.

I said, “I’m not sure.”

I debated going to get my laptop; wondered how dishonest it would be to backdate a post by less than 15 minutes; started to compose said post in my head; and then, I gave it up and went to sleep.

*I’m reading Sins of the 7th Sister,which is supposed to be based on a true story (the author’s own story, in fact), but probably isn’t.

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Turns out, www.artoftheodd.com expires today. And I didn’t get the renewal notice why? Oh, because I’m a dork, and when I transferred my hosting to Dreamhost, I didn’t set up an account for the email address I had attached to my Whois record. Fine, I’ll transfer the registration to Dreamhost, since I have to renew anyway. What do you mean it’s going to take a week? Do I have to look at that “parked” page for a week?

(For the record – no, I didn’t. The transfer was complete in less than an hour.)

Moral of the story – know when your domain names expire, and make sure your registrar can actually get a hold of you to let you know that’s happening.

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How’d I forget? Um… Well, after my lesson with Amara, I picked NovySan up from work, we took the rental car back, then we picked up a friend of Ben‘s who’s vacationing in Santa Monica and took him to dinner at Lula. (Which isn’t as good as Finn‘s, but I did like my chile relleno. And the sexy matador pinups in the bar are a definite plus.) So, by the time we got home, I was fried, and just flat forgot. (And after thinking to myself, “I’ll have to post when I get home,” too.)

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