The New Year is Starting Slowly - Or I Am Anyway

I'm still trying to drag myself out of the holiday blues and regain my normal schedule.

Reading has been slow.  I've started books but can't seem to stay engaged.  I'm sure it's me, not them.  I'm a little depressed to find that I read about eleven fewer books last year than I did in 2013.  There were a few personal problems last year that made finding time to read and concentrating on reading  difficult.

Since 1968, I've been keeping sporadic track of the books I've read.  Sporadic in the earlier years but compulsive for many years.  I use 3 x 5 cards and file them in a lovely old oak double file drawer.  I decided that I didn't have enough to do with my spare time, so I logged all those cards into a program I created on my lap top.  Now I can sort them by author, title, or date I finished reading them.  And they're all on my lap top, so when someone blogs about a book, I can just open my program and check to see if I've read it.  (Yeah, I bet you remember all the books you've read, right?!)

I hate the holidays for many reasons.  Mostly because my late mother was the spirit of Christmas and since we lost her to dementia and to death fifteen years ago, Christmas hasn't been the same.  I don't miss her less, I miss her more.  But we have three little girls in the family, my grandnieces, two 2-year-olds and one 4-year-old, who made this past Christmas more fun.  They're lovely and smart and thoughtful and funny.

Jack has become obsessed with the jigsaw puzzle my sister gave him for Christmas.  I think she's trying to drive him insane.  The puzzle is a borderless poinsettia, that is, the border is the leaves of the plant.  There are no 'edge' pieces like in a regular square or rectangular puzzle.  But bless his little manic soul, he's determined it's not going to get the best of him!  It would be nice to eat at the dining room table again, though.

The two books I've finished so far this year are The Curious Affair of the Third Dog by Patricia Moyes and Die Again by Tess Gerritsen.  Of the two, I liked the second much better.  The first was slow going.  I also decided I don't like mysteries in which the author spends the last five or ten pages explaining what happened.  I want to know what happened by the time I get to the end of the book.  The Tess Gerritsen book was an exciting, fast read, as most of the Rizzoli and Isles books are.  (God save us from that awful television series!)  I needed something like that to help kick me out of my reading slump.

That may or may not be working since I'm currently reading about five books and although I'm enjoying all of them, I don't feel compelled to get back to any of them.  That's not the way I like to read.  There are still a lot of year-end things to do, especially since Jack and I are self-employed.  There are estimated taxes to pay, files to sort out for the accountant, new file folders to make  -  fun stuff, but someone (me) has to do them.

Jack has helpfully pointed out that even though we may retire this year, I, as the business partner / housewife, will still have all the same chores and duties in my role as the housewife.  I hope what he meant to say was that after he retires completely, he'll have more time to learn how to do laundry, fold it properly, and help with the cleaning (which he currently does sporadically).  He'll do most of the cooking, I hope, but he can't buy groceries because other people in the stores drive him mad.  It's best to keep him away form grocery stores unless I can find one that's open 24 hours a day and he can go in the middle of the night.

Turtle, our cat, is correct.  It is now 5:00PM and she's entitled to her dinner.  So, I'll leave you puzzling over this post and hope to have something more interesting to write about soon.

Black Widower - Patricia Moyes

Tampica is a fictional Caribbean island, newly independent from Great Britain.  At the new nation's  first reception in Washington, DC, the wife of the new ambassador kills herself after getting drunk and making a fool of herself.  Or did she?

After questions about her death arise, the ambassador is eager to find out what happened and to close the case.  They don't want the DC police to be involved and they don't have their own crack detectives to ship up from the islands, so they decide it would be proper to have someone from Scotland Yard investigate.  They ask for Inspector Henry Tibbett.

As Inspector Tibbett looks into the woman's death, he discovers that despite her sexually casual and fairly alcoholic past, she had been on her best behavior that night.  She was not drunk, she was drugged.  And she did not shoot herself, she was shot.  Now all he has to do is discover who did it.

This involves a trip to Tampica.  He and his wife spend a few days in the sun and the surf, allegedly on vacation, while he talks to locals and discretely gathers information.  They must rush back to DC when he realizes that their hostess there is in grave danger from the killer.  The killer has killed the ambassador's wife and an employee at the embassy and is about to strike again.

No, I'm not going to tell you who did it!  What would be the point of reading the book then?  It's a fairly short book, just a little over 200 pages, so if it sounds interesting, read it yourself!