TWISTED THREADS by Lea Wait

For those who have taken a look at my "Reading List Page, you'll see that the ONLY comment was made by author, Lea Wait, in August, 2013 about her upcoming cozy mystery "stitching series."  I had read all her Antique Print cozy mysteries to date and posted them to my Reading List, but how she ran across it, I haven't a clue. I was surprised and delighted that she had. As for the new stitching series, I've been waiting ever since.

Twisted Threads, was released on January 6th. In honor of its release there have been a few give-aways. I was amazed and delighted to learn that I won a copy! Wow!!!. Can't wait to receive and read it! Thank you Lea Wait and Dru Ann. I'm sure it will be an intricate plot involving a needlepoint piece written by an author who is very skilled in crafting plots, characters and descriptions. I'll recommend it having yet to even read it!

Shadows on a Maine Christmas, released last September, is a continuation of her Antique Print mystery series, which includes fascinating details about various antique prints - many of which are woven into the story line. Each chapter begins with a comment and/or picture about an antique print, many of which are incorporated into the storyline. The information is authentic and fascinating- Lea Wait is an antique print dealer in real life. For example: Shadows of a Down East Summer is multi-period, the story interwoven with a summer spent on the Maine coast and the prints/paintings by Winslow Homer.

Read about Lea, her background and her books for children and adults on her website!}

Not a cozy mystery fan? Didn't realize I was/would be either until the last few years. Seeing as how I read The Complete Sherlock Homes the summer between 6th and 7th grade, and all of the Mrs. Pollifax novels, starting with one in a Readers Digest Condensed Books volume at about the same age,  makes you wonder why not, doesn't it?  Give Lea's books a read. I'm pretty sure you'll be hooked as well.

I highly recommend Lea's books for adults and children to all those cozy mystery readers. Actually I recommend them to anyone who enjoys a good read!

BTW, my neice, Denise Belinda McDonald, who has had several e-books published/released, is starting to write cozy mysteries. She's sent me a copy of the one she is currently shopping. It's my next "read!" Stay tuned.

In a Stitching & Blogging Funk

But I've read 13 novels in the past 2 months, all but 1 a cozy mystery. I go in spurts: either stitch or read. I logged in this morning to update my Reading List but instead inadvertently managed to delete the entire contents going back to 2009 or 2010. I'm naturally upset. I MAY try to reconstruct a partial list based on the "Reading History"  from my Library Account, but that only goes back to November 2011.   Few people even visited that Page, The only comments I've received, those from author Lea Wait, did not disappear. That, at least, is a relief!

I THINK about stitching and I've gone through some of the gallon plastic bags I keep WIP's in, but that's pretty much as far as it's gotten in the past 6 or 8 weeks. I haven't touched the Welcome Friends grapevine project since June or July, even though it's probably 80% complete. The only recent finish was the small PS halloween freebie - in July. I need to turn that into something to send to my DD before Halloween. I've still a few stitches left on the 3rd Patriotic Santa, also not touched in maybe 6 months. In early September I did briefly pick up my Lizzie Kate ABC's of Aging that I started in May or June of LAST year and has been sitting for almost a year.  Does just one wrong color just completely stop you in your tracks? I thought I'd FINALLY found a workable substitute. Did maybe 10 or 20 stitches recently- BUT NO, that won't work either. I could probably finish the stitching in less than a week, but I'm stuck! And then there are multiple-year's worth of WIP's still waiting for renewed attention.

There is a North Texas GTG scheduled for November 1 & 2nd in north Dallas.  Many out of area stitchers are coming and rooms are or were available at very reasonable rates. But since it's less than a hour's drive, I'll probably just drive over for one of those days - most likely Saturday. Looks like it will be fun, and it'll be good to get to put some faces with stitchers from the 123MB. The cost is $20 to offset meeting room rental fees. If anyone is interested, let me know IMMEDIATELY and I'll direct you to the organizers. Lots of goodies and some designer freebies to be passed around.

Found out last week that Henna, my 17-year-old ginger cat, probably has Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy - an incurable heart problem that involves thickening of the heart muscle thus a "gallop" rhythm and restricted blood flow and all that eventually portends. In fact, the vet now tells me she had the same "gallop" issues last year but I understood the rapid rate to be related to anxiety about the visit to the vet - who certainly didn't make a big deal over it at the time. The other possibility is pericardial effusion, excess fluid in the sac around the heart. For treatment either has to be formally diagnosed, which requires an echocardiogram thus a veterinary cardiologist, which I'm sure is very expensive.  She also has peridontal disease, but at her age the risk of anesthesia is too high. Otherwise she is in remarkably good health for a cat of any age. For now the doctor suggested a baby-aspirin therapy to help with blood flow, and antibiotics for her dental issues. Something I can do.

Like Dixieland jazz? Here's something UPBEAT. My brother's Dixieland Band recently played at what is the new incarnation of the former Crystal Cathedral congregation.  Here's the current link. At the bottom of the video player, move your pointer to 29:29. The tune is "Washington and Lee" and he has no idea how it fit into the theme of the sermon either. But it's GREAT Dixieland jazz!

Unusal site for needlecraft freebies but

I enjoy reading cozy mystery series, something I discovered a couple of years ago. There are all sorts of cozies related to location, comfortable or off-beat characters, wine, foods & sugary goodies, dogs/cats, etc. I tend to read just 1 or 2 series at a time to the extent they are available at the Library, then must find another author. Which is what I was doing early this morning. I thought, there MUST be needlecraft mysteries, which is how I happened upon author Monica Ferris, whose heroine has taken over her murdered sister's needlework shop and becomes a sleuth in the process. This is already a 16-book series so I'm behind to start, but unfortunately only the most recent books are at my library. But beside the point of the FREEBIE reference. In reading about the author I discovered that in each book there is a needlecraft chart related to the story: cross stitch, needlepoint, a black work, a cut out, bookmarks, etc. A Christmas ornament, a Taun horse, a phoenix, and other delights. Even more important for this purpose, the author has made each of the patterns available online as a .pdf freebie!

Visit: http://monica-ferris.com/books  Click on the "Pattern" at the bottom of the description of each of her books and explore the possibilities! You may also decide to read one of her books in the process. They get good reviews, so I'm excited to start reading an author new to me.

WIP Progress, Reading Binge, New Freebie Links

After a long hiatus, I finally did some stitching earlier this month. But mostly I've been on a reading (and ice cream) binge. Since 9/5 I've read 19 books, six of them in the past week including 3 mysteries by Laura Levine, a TV sitcom writer turned novelist (her heroine, Jaine Austen, is owned by a cat named Prozac - it gets funnier), the latest MC Beaton Agatha Raisen mystery, the final Anne & Todd McCaffrey PERN novel (okay, I read some, became totally disenchanted and confused, read the ending which left me even more confused, put it aside while I read 2 other books and deciding whether I wanted to even go back to it, skimmed another couple of chapters then took it back to the library. Okay, I didn't read all of it, nor can I recommend it even to hardcore Anne and PERN fans.The last couple of days I've read Killing Lincoln, pausing in the middle to read one of the far more light-hearted and wholly inconsequential Jaine Austen mysteries. I've got a several hundred page, non-fiction Time Traveller's Guide to the Universe to probably read all of (I enjoy astronomy), a cozy mystery by a different writer, and put 2 more Jaine Austen mysteries on reserve at the Library. Now that my eyes are totally fried, I need to try to get back to stitching - something anyway. I really hadn't intended to finish "Bless This Nest," yet there I was stitching on it for hours at a time. I'm a fast reader but a very SLOW stitcher.

** Check out the new links on my Freebie List!

My Library & Lost Books - I FINALLY Acidentally Found Them!!

I love my branch library. Though originally located in a much smaller stand-alone building, with some actual individual character, it was moved into it's current storefront location within the same shopping center in 1996 when the small Safeway sold out to some other chain (now defunct) which built a new, much larger facility directly behind the former Safeway (where the Library was) requiring it's destruction. Though considerably larger in square footage than the building it replaced, the storefront location was too small from the outset. It's ALWAYS busy.

Consequently, having the entire catalog of books and materials from all the Arlington libraries online one can peruse at leisure, reserve any book regardless of actual location, have it delivered to then pick it up from my local branch in under 2 minutes is wonderfully convenient! With renewals, one can check out a book for up to 9-weeks. I rarely have to renew anything. Usually.

Last spring I checked out a  couple of books in the mystery series I was then reading. Finished both in a week or so. Afterwards was pretty sure that at some  point I had had them with me to return when I ran errands one day, but maybe it started raining, and maybe instead I brought them home and inside - where they immediately disappeared into my very own personal black hole - where many things I never find again apparently de-coalesce.  I searched and I searched and I searched, even making special trips to 2 restaurants where I might have taken one or the other of them to read and maybe had inadvertently left it there? Maybe once, but TWICE?? No. I searched places in the house where they couldn't ever possibly be. By the end of the 9-weeks I reluctantly reached the only other reasonable conclusion: that somehow I had inadvertently knocked them off into the recycle bin or garbage can and were long gone, as unlikely as that might be. Still that MIGHT have happened. On the last possible day of the last possible renewal period I womaned-up and told a librarian I simply could not find the books and needed to pay for them. if you don't by the final due date you've got to pay the accumulated fines PLUS the cost of replacing the book. 

I thought that libraries would get some sort of wholesale deal. Apparently not. Full hard cover price was what it was going to cost me, plus $5 fee per book. (Assuming they are till in print, which I doubt.) Total? Sixty bucks! Yikes. I pulled out my MC. To my surprise the librarian suggested I keep looking, checked them out to me as if from scratch and started that whole 9-week cycle over. I received 2 more reprieves over the summer, the last one extending the "absolutely need to find by" date to October 22nd. I had no where else I could look and by the end of September I was past ready to call it quits, pony up the full amount and just get it over with. As of October 1st I had one more 3-week renewal left, but enough was enough. I stopped at the library to just pay. Had the lines not been very long with kids apparently from a near-by children's center checking out books through the librarians (rather than self-serve) I would have. Instead I came home and did that one final 3-week renewal online to avoid fines on top of the cost of the books. I was going to pay Saturday and would have had I managed to get out of the house before the Library closed early. Monday was a holiday, so definitely TUESDAY. I was tired of dealing with it.

With that decision firmly made ... Saturday night I was changing the bed, carefully moving my current reading venture to the nightstand so I'd know exactly where it was. Ok, just how many times have I changed the bed in the last 5 months? I can't even count. As usual I was struggling to tuck the fitted sheet at the foot of the bed. There is always that one last hard to get to corner that necessarily involves brute force and the hope one doesn't dislocated a shoulder or get flung across the room in the process. I'd already done the 3rd corner. Between the last 2 I spotted a piece of fabric between the mattress and the foot of the bed. A pillow case. I plucked it out and ... wait .. what momentary miniscule glint did I just spy out of the corner of my little eye? Still holding on to the ever-so-slightly bent far corner of the mattress, I looked closer into the shadows at the end of the bed. Did I see what I thought I just saw? I reached down to feel. It was hard. I looked closer. Could it possibly be ...YES YES Y E S !!!! BOTH books ... And after months and months, suddenly serendipitously there they were, wedged side-by-side in the just-wide-enough space between the box springs and the railed foot of my will-survive-any-old-EF5 of the cast iron bedstead. But hadn't I looked there several times already? And why hadn't I seen them when changing sheets or when standing at the dresser not 2 feet away?  They SHOULD have been pretty obvious. I can't explain it! Nonetheless, HURRAY!! At LAST.  There they both were, resting edgewise on the lip of the frame that the box spring sits on, otherwise they would have fallen to the floor and I would have found them months ago during any one of the numerous times I looked under the bed with the flashlight (one would hope), but too low for me to feel when I tucked in the top sheets. I couldn't believe it. After all these months and all that searching...

I was going to drop them off at the library after church today, but decided I wanted to make dern sure they were properly checked in by handing them directly to a librarian rather than just drop them in the outside return slot. So Monday then. No TUESDAY.  They're laying on the front seat of my car. Not bringing those 2 back inside the house. WHEW!!!  Quite a scare. I've felt really guilty all along.

UPDATE: I did hand them to a library assistant who immediately checked them in for me. Double WHEW!

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MILESTONE:  I mark the passage of the seasons by more practical measures than a date on the calendar: 1) when in the fall it's finally cool enough inside to put on sweats, and 2) when it's too warm the next spring (here it's usually still officially "winter.") to continue to wear them. This year my YIPPEE SWEATS!! day was October 6th, when we set a Record LOW high of 57, another Record LOW high on Sunday, then tied a record low LOW on Monday morning of 39.  I only recently got to turn my A/C OFF I'm not about to turn the heater ON any time soon. It got down to 63 in the house. I'm pretty sure October 6th is the earliest YIPPEE SWEATS!! Day has ever been! YIPPEE!!!  

It's 5:40 a.m. and the temp is still 89 Degrees

Yesterday was another record high 107. HAVE I MENTIONED: I HATE SUMMER??? I spent part of yesterday and all last night drinking iced tea with the fan blowing directly on me from a distance of only 3 feet while reading Requiem at the Refuge  - a Sister Mary Helen Mystery. I've been reading a LOT lately. See my Book List.