The Whittaker Saga

  As spring starts to turn into summer, Abigail is finally getting married!  The wedding was set to Saturday, so it's been a week of preparations. It started with a holiday service on Easter Sunday. As I've played the active service several times now, I opted for sending the family through the rabbit hole this time. After church, the family visited the park, where Frank met and played with Mathias Bradshaw, and Ida kept befriending the local rabbit.  All in all it was a very pleasant Easter Sunday. On Monday, it was Ida's first day of school. She got ready by washing up in her new wash bowl in her room, with certain...unforeseen consequences:  Luckily she was quite alright even after merging with the dresser (I love CC but they don't always work as intended). For Abigail it became a day of learning about what a soon to be former governess does with her time when there are no kids in the house. She decided to learn how to paint. She also played the piano, knitte...

  One more week as passed in game, and we are now well into Spring. Abigail cannot say she liked the start of this week. Spring arrived, but she started the week by falling ill. The next day that illness has spread to almost everyone else in the family, save for Ida who seemed to be doing just fine. (As an interesting side note, there was actually an epidemic of influensa in March 1891. Granted it was in Chicago, but still. This game continues to surprise me, it's almost too well matched with history. Now one of the rules of this challenge, one I am actually keeping, is the no medicine rule for this decade. Mostly because medicine was unreliable at the time due to poor regulation of the research and publication of findings. One part of this was that almost anyone could - and would - publish in journals with potential cures for diseases, and another that many pharmacies came up with their own concoctions, some of which were more reliable than others. Some where even dangerous. M...

It's been an eventful week in the Whittaker household, and it started dramatically with a fire when the gas lighting in Abigail's bedroom malfunctioned!!! Fires were of course common in the 1890s, with many wooden houses, lots of fabrics and mostly live flames, yet it wasn't until this very year, 1891, that New Orleans saw fit to actually pay their fire fighters. Before this year they had all been volunteers. Still Louisiana did have a working fire brigade, and while the furniture in Abigail's room didn't survive the fire, the house and the rest of the family did.  For Abigail a few uncomfortable nights are spent in the maid's quarters at night before new furniture can be delivered. Joseph, however, goes into a worrying frenzy, not able to let the fire go. He is constantly tense and fearful of new fires. What to do? The solution comes in a revolutionary new and modern contraption: the radiator! Radiators were invented in the middle of the century, but became...