Was Tolstoy Left-Handed?

Several southpaw sites, which give me, another leftie, pleasure, claim the Count for one of our own. But a quick online search turns up only portraits of him, like this one, as a rightie:



Did the artist lie? Did Tolstoy pretend? Have the sinistral activists been passing a bum meme?

I'm hoping someone who reads this will know.

Nightmarish Chez Moi

My kids have nightmares about dismemberment, monsters and Count Olaf.

Here is the nightmare content of the sleep period from which I just awakened (or DID I?):

-my mother-in-law is angry with me

-my mother invites a big crowd in to a buffet meal just before we all have to get in a car and leave. "Mom, do we have to clean this up before we go?"

-to a guest I say, nearly in tears, "Everything in this house is broken or about to be broken."

-I have to drive to Syracuse and back in one day, without a map. After lots of guesswork I say to a man who has called my cell phone, "I can see the Carrier Dome!"

-my friend will be coming with me, my kids and my husband on this long car trip. "We'll have to eat in the car, there's no time." I say. "No!" she says, "I can't do that, we'll have to stop!" That's after we clean up the buffet dinner. We will arrive home very late.

-I don't know how to get all these people in the car to leave on this trip.

Giant Food

When I was a kid, we shopped at the Giant. That says it all. It was a vast, freezing place that we had to meander through endlessly to find what was on my Mom's list. I much preferred our occasional visits to the local grocer in a nearby town. Maybe they didn't have as much stuff, but the temperature was reasonable and you could walk across the entire floor of the place in ten seconds.

Now, my favorite place to shop is a food co-op with TWO aisles. I can find pretty much everything I need there. The only problem with the co-op is I have to drive to get to it. But I can walk to Hannafords, my town's version of the Giant.

Despite its size and subzero climate, Hannafords hasn't been so bad, because they had a special organic area on the left side of the store where I did all my shopping. This summer I got used to walking downhill to Hannafords early in the morning and getting my shopping done while nobody was there. Toting my bags home was a good strength workout.

Then they did a bad thing.

They started taking all their organic and whole foods and shoving them in among all the other highly-processed crap they sell. The transition is now virtually complete. What was the organic section at my Hannfords is now the cookies and chips section, and if I want "my kind of food" (those edibles least likely to kill me in this 21st century), I must wear roller blades or plan to spend the day wandering the toxic-smelling aisles of the wasteland that is contemporary American food, except where "organic" has made some inroads. I know this is probably a good development for the crapeaters, who may now incorporate some pesticide-free fruit or brown rice into their diets, but I am vexed. I want my ghetto back.