Full Metal Wheelbarrow

"Alart:We’re concerned an untrusted activity on your Apple ID account on December 24, 2017."

I appear to have been spammed by an illiterate time-traveller....

Had a cognitive dissonance moment earlier. Reading a book about supernatural goings on in New York, wizards, vampires, that sort of malarkey, when the narrator describes someone as having hands covered in something that "looked like black pudding".

Took me a moment or two to realise that he must mean the sort of thick custardy stuff that Americans call "pudding" rather than the blood sausages that are "black pudding" here.....

I have not been around much lately.

I shall try to remedy that.

The problem is that I am intrinsically lazy, and it's *so* much easier to post pictures to Facebook...

March's books

35. Sun In Glory by Mercedes Lackey, et al.
36. Mrs Hudson and the Spirits’ Curse by Martin Davies.
37. Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller*
38. Wolverine’s Daughter by Doranna Durgin
39. A Bird in the Hand by Ann Cleeves
40. Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines
41. Angel by Carola Dunn
42. Conflict of Honors by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller*
43. In the Market For Murder by T.E. Kinsey
44. The Corpse With The Silver Tongue by Cathy Ace.
45. His Christmas Countess by Loiuse Allen
46. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
47. Claimed by Shadow by Karen Chance
48. The Satanic Mechanic by Sally Andrew
49. Alas, She Drowned by Monica Knightley

Book Abandoned :- Shaded Light by J.A. Menzies

Best book of the month was definitely "A Monster Calls". It made me cry, but is excellently written.

Some pictures from the last few days

( Birdies&stuff )

So, the protagonist of a detective novel is in an apartment whose owner has been murdered by poison.

Another resident of the same building has also died, within a day of the first victim, probably also by poison.

The protagonist is a criminologist, moderately sensible and intelligent.

They have just had lunch with the victim's wife and friends (sent in from a restaurant) and they are cleaning up the remnants while the others do things elsewhere.

They find a glass of cold beer in the kitchen.

They do not know who put it there.

They drink it.

On a scale of one to ten, how hard would you throw the book at the wall?

The World's Dimmest Chaffinch is back trying to peck through my kitchen window.

Or else someone round here is trying to make a really low-rent production of The Birds....

I was partway through crocheting a tiny top hat last night , put the thing down to make a cup of tea and when I came back in the hook had disappeared.

Since we don't even have a sofa for it to have fallen down the back of, I can only assume we must have Feegle in the house and the little hooters have taken up pole-vaulting....

Just been reading a murder mystery.

Got about a quarter of the way through and there had been no detecting, nor yet any murder done. In fact we'd only met the detectives briefly in a short prologue. The first 90 odd pages of the book were introducing various members of a weekend party in modern day Canada and hinting at various reasons some of them might have for bumping off others.

Which is all well and good, but not my preferred style of mystery - I like to learn about the characters as the detectives do, so that I'm aware of the same evidence they are. Still I was prepared to give it a chance. Until one of the characters began banging on about her personal relationship with God in such a way that i strongly suspected she was a mouthpiece for the author.

I don't object to characters in fiction having sincere religious beliefs - indeed, one of my favourite fictional detectives is Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk - but I don't care for authors who *preach* at me. Shan't be reading any more of *that* one.

Small things that irk me, No. 6921:-

When I'm logged into my account on the Parcel2Go website and it still insists on defaulting to Mr as my title.

Not sure why it needs to use a title at all, for that matter.