telephone........................................................... ring

Ah, what a day.

I've been tracking 63 people that were discharged from Upper Shore Hospital when it closed because of budget cuts.

About twenty-five of these people have been incredibly hard to find.

Today I called a number I've tried a bunch of times before. A family member picked up and told me that the person I'm looking for is dead. He died last week of natural causes.

The average lifespan of someone with persistent, severe mental illness is twenty-five years shorter than a peer without mental illness.

Another father I spoke with said that he kicked his daughter out because she won't take her medicine. She is living in the car in the front yard.

FENCE contest

I placed as fellowship winner of the FENCE SLS contest. That means I wasn't in the top three, but I placed high enough to be granted a partial scholarship to attend the writing conferences in either Montreal, Kenya or

Lithuania.

You get one guess as to which program I'm going to attend.

The Lithuania program isn't until next year. It will celebrate the 100th birthday of Lithuanian born Milosz. I'm glad that it won't be for a while, even though it's hard to wait. I'll have time to save up.