Donna Andrews

Gardening perils

I was at a garden show a few weeks back, and succumbed to the temptation to buy a new gardening toy.  Um, tool.  Anyway, I got a pair of Lawn Aerator Shoes.  Wicked looking things--the idea is to strap them onto your feet and then march around the lawn, poking little holes in it so air, water, and nutrients can reach the roots of your grass.  Sounded particularly useful, given that I have heavy clay soil that all too easily becomes packed into a pottery-like surface unwelcoming to grass.

Assembling the shoes was tedious, but easy--though I had to be careful, because the spikes were pretty sharp.  And there were thirteen in each shoe, and all twenty-six had to be screwed into the sole of the shoe and tightened with a small wrench (included in the package--nice touch!)

Then I stepped out to begin the aeration of my lawn--and almost fell flat on my face.  I'd stepped out of the shoes.  My clay soil really pulls on the spikes, and the straps wouldn't stay tight.  They had that kind of buckle where you weave the strap in and out and it's supposed to hold tight with tension--which I never think works as well as the old fashioned kind of buckle with a prong that fits into little holes in the strap.  Or maybe I just hadn't threaded the strap through right.  Annoying.  I adjourned my aeration session.

Last night I felt inspired to try again, and after some experimentation, arrived on what seemed to be the optimal/approved method of fastening the straps.  Took a while--I decided clogs were not the platform for aeration, and was operating barefoot, though planning to get my Reeboks for the actual stomping about--but I was happy that I seemed to have gotten the hang of the strapping and had fastened one shoe on firmly enough that it withstood a few test stomps.  Then I picked up the other shoe to work on it, and managed to nick the side of the foot wearing the aerator, and blood was running out along the spikes.  I adjourned the project again and limped upstairs with a paper towel staunching the blood flow, to wash off all the gardening mud and bind my wounds. 

The spike wound is still a little sore this morning, so perhaps aeration will have to wait a day or two. 

In the meantime, maybe I should take up a nice safe hobby, like bungee jumping.

So if you're going to Malice . . .

I'm afraid you're on your own when it comes to finding copies of all the book that are nominated for the Agatha Award.  But the short stories--which can be harder to find--are all available from the authors' or publishers' websites.   And the nominees are:

Donna Andrews, "A Rat's Tale"

 

Rhys Bowen, "Please Watch Your Step"

 

Nan Higginson, "Casino Gamble"

 

Elizabeth Zelvin, "Death Will Clean Your Closet"

 

Spring, maybe, at long last

The hellebores are in bloom--profuse, riotous, extravagant bloom. 

Those are not adjectives I would previously have associated with hellebores.  I'd have called them subtle--the soft, shaded matte colors do not photograph as well as they show in real life, and the blooms often peek shyly out from the middle of the foliage.  I love them not because they're showy but because they're odd-looking; because they bloom early in the spring when there's not much else out, and because the deer seem to ignore them. 

Of course, "the deer don't eat 'em" has become the core strategy of my gardening efforts these days.  But that's another story.

Maybe my hellebores have finally settled in and this year is normal hellebore behavior.  Maybe this year was perfect hellebore weather.  Not sure what it is, but the hellebores have never been happier.  I am used to having people stop and comment on my daffodils. You put somewhere upward of a thousand daffodil bulbs in the ground and you're going to get something that's at least a LITTLE impressive.

But this spring was the first time anyone ever stopped while walking by my yard not just to say how much they loved the daffodils but to ask, "What is THAT?"  Pointing to one of the most exuberant hellebores.  Heck, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted one of the hellebores and thought, "Gee . . . I don't remember planting an azalea there."  I actually wondered for a moment if one of my friends had done a drive-by azalea planting as an Easter present.

Along with "the deer don't like it," the other core tenet of my gardening philosophy is pragmatism.  As in "Hey, that's doing well.  Let's plant some more of that."  I planted a dozen more hellebores over the last week or so.

. . . and more to come.

Intruder alert! And general update

I just chased an intruder out of my house.  Before anyone begins worrying about my safety or congratulating me on my bravery, I should add that the intruder didn't weigh more than a few ounces. 

It was a small brown bird--I have no idea what kind.  To my father's dismay, my birdwatching skills never progressed much beyond identifying the really obvious birds--cardinals, blue jays, titmice, chickadees, and such.  He was very fond of all the small brown birds--wrens and sparrows mostly--and took pride in being able to identify them. Me--I just know it was a small brown bird.  Possibly a house wren or house sparrow trying to live up to its name.

I'm hoping it flew into the house when I took out the trash a little while ago.  The only other logical possibility would be that I've got a hole in my house that's big enough to let in birds, and that's an unappealing idea.  But also an unlikely one.  The woodpecker has been pecking another hole in my siding, but I think I'd have noticed if he'd broken through to the inside, opening a highway for every wren, sparrow, and squirrel in the yard.

I managed to trap the intruder in the bathroom with an open window, and went away for ten or fifteen minutes to allow him to fly out.  When I peeked in again, I saw that he was ignoring the temptingly open window and settling in for the night on the top of the glass shower enclosure.  He seemed more interested in getting back out into the bedroom than in vacating the house, so I shut the door and went looking for tools.  The yardstick was too short, but the extensible ceiling duster could reach to the far wall of the bathroom, and I didn't figure there was much danger of hurting him with the fluffy end of it, so I stuck it in and waved it around until he got the hint.  Exit one bird.

Was it just my imagination, or did he look more cross than frightened?  Why am I imagining several hundred small brown forms who have established squatters' rights in someone's little used media room, and are rewatching the last half of The Birds to work up their collective courage to retake my living quarters?

It's the drugs.  Over-the-counter drugs, I hasten to add; Sudafed and Benedryl and all the helpful pills and potions modern medicine has invented to cope with the common cold.  If I've been silent lately, that might be a good thing, because when I have a cold, I get just a wee bit grouchy.  Okay, I turn into Scrooge, especially this time of year.

But my spirits took a turn for the better this morning when I got some good news--The Penguin Who Knew Too Much has been nominated for the Lefty Award!  Of course, as one would expect, it's up against some excellent books by friends, so we're hoping for a  multiple tie.  (For a full list of the Lefty nominees, along with the Arties and the Rockies, see the Awards Page of the Left Coast Crime 2008 site.)

And for anyone who thinks I've been too silent of late . . . check out my recent blog on the Femmes Fatales blog -- all about "Trying on Other People's Lives."  I've also done not one but three interviews on other sites or blogs recently.  Luckily the three interviewers didn't ask many of the same questions, so it was pretty easy to make sure all three were quite different.

First G.M. Malliet interviewed me for the Inkspot, a blog for authors published by Midnight Ink.  (Her first book, Death of a Cozy Writer, is due out in July.)  Part one was published on November 21, and part 2 on December 26. . . and I won't tell you which part contains my thoughts on who should play Meg in the movie version, if someone ever decides to make a movie version.

On December 29, Tayler Bloom posted her interview, in which she coaxes out of me a partial list of stuff that makes me laugh.

And Betty Webb posted her interview on January 3, and made me 'fess up about, among other things, my sad addiction to punning titles.

See, not quite idle after all. 

An update on those translated titles

Julie Dalyrimple emailed me with a comment on the German titles.  She says:

"Alle vogel sind schon tot" I think is a play on a line from a spring song I learned in German class in high school, "Alle Vogel sind schon da" (All the birds are already there). I hope the book turns out as  funny in German as it is in English.

In other words, the German title is a pun!  Okay, I can get that.  I suspect Falscher Vogel fängt den Tod will turn out to be another pun.

And in answer to Liz Clifford--yes, I collect the foreign editions of my books.  In fact, I have a shelf in one corner of my office where I keep all the editions I can get my paws on--hardback, paperback, large type, foreign, and audio.  The photo at the top of the blog shows what it looks like at the moment--including the armed action figures I keep around to guard it.

What I've been up to

Blogging about author spam over on the Sisters in Crime blog. (Kris Neri also has some incisive thoughts on spam over at the Femmes Fatales blog--where my latest contribution was a confession on what happens when writers screw up. (At left: weather over Yorktown.)

And for anyone who thinks I've been too silent...

Check out my guest blog at the Inkspot, a blog for writers--November 21,  in case you're coming in late, and many thinks to G. M. Malliet for inviting me.

Wrong bird catches death

That,  according to Babelfish, is a literal translation of the German title of Murder with Peacocks.  Falscher Vogel fängt den Tod.  A small stash of copies arrived at my house yesterday, and I was most impressed.  Very classy looking.  Not that I don't love the American cover, mind you; but I'm always fascinated to see how different the Japanese covers and now the German covers are.  Very cool. I'm sure "fängt den Tod" is actually some cool idiom for murder, like "knocked off" or "sleeps with the fishes."z   

My writer friend Ellen Crosby actually went to the publisher's site to recommend my translation to her relatives in Austria and discovered that Murder with Puffins is also coming out in German, under the title Alle Vögel sind schon tot--which Babelfish informs me means All the Birds are Already Dead.  Also a cool cover, shown at right. 

For anyone who wants to know what the book is about, in German:

Meg Langslow ist verzweifelt. Gleich drei Verwandte haben sie mit ihrer jeweiligen Hochzeitsplanung betraut. Und Meg hat alle Hände voll zu tun, ihre exzentrische Familie unter einen Hut zu bringen. Da kommt ihr die Ankunft einer Fremden, die Andeutungen über alte ›Leichen im Keller‹ eines der Hochzeitspaare macht, äußerst ungelegen. Zumal diese Fremde kurz darauf unter mysteriösen Umständen tot aufgefunden wird. Auf Megs endloser Liste der zu erledigenden Dinge steht plötzlich auch die Jagd nach einem gefährlichen Killer – wobei das nächste große Familienereignis ihre eigene Beerdigung zu werden droht ...

I'll spare you the Babelfish translation, which is pretty darn garbled, but reassures me that this is probably my book they've translated. 

Back from Alaska

I had a great time at Bouchercon in Alaska.  Didn't take too many pictures of people at the convention--my cameras had their hearts set on gorgeous scenery, which I finally gave them on Monday, October 1, when some friends and I took a scenic cruise along the Kenai fjords.  Okay, I did get a few nice shots hanging out the windows of the hotels in Anchorage and Bethel and walking around the streets of Anchorage, but the non-cruise photos were the minority.  I might even write something about the trip when I get over the jetlag.  In the meantime, hope you enjoy the photos.

Adventures with wildlife

My family has been having wildlife adventures lately.

On Thursday, I went to dinner at Ariake, a divine local Japanese restaurant, with my friend Chris.  I was happy to escape the house, since I'd embarked on a major book sorting and purging project, and the house had reached that state familiar to anyone who has ever done a major cleaning project, where you wish you hadn't even started because it looks so much worse than when you began. 

Anyway, Chris's bento box was so large that even with my help on some non-seafood items, she couldn't finish it, so she tucked a piece of salmon in a baggie she'd brought, just in case.  Leftovers for her, with maybe a little for her senior cat.

When she was dropping me off, she said, "Look, there's someone in your back yard."  It was a deer--actually, four of them.  I decided to demonstrate how I chase them off, so I ran toward them, waving my hands and barking.  They all fled, leaping lightly over the fence--except for one who either had an injury or an aversion to jumping or was too stupid to figure out that jumping was the best tactic.  He (or she) kept running up and down in the corner of the split rail fence, trying to get between the bars,  which wasn't a very smart idea, since there is green mesh wire all up and down the fence to make it dog-proof, and even a butterfly would have trouble squeezing between the bars.  He finally wriggled under the fence, pushing part of the wire out--I'll have to fix that before I have visiting dogs.  Craziest thing I've ever seen, a deer going under rather than over the fence.

Still laughing and shaking our heads, Chris and I went back to her  van--and found that I'd left the passenger side door open in my haste to chase the deer, and my next-door neighbors' cat had climbed in and was sitting in the driver's seat.  He retreated to the back, which was filled with boxes and bags of all kinds for him to hide in, and it took a while for us to open enough doors that he felt secure in exiting through one of them.  The salmon, which had no doubt caught his attention, was untouched.

I went back to my book schlepping grateful for the break--not to mention the amusing distractions.

Then Friday I got a frantic email from Mom:

I may need  you to come down before Monday.  The man was here to clean the furnace - made one trip into the basement and came up with the news that I have snakes in there as he saw skins on the rafters.  I called an exterminator who will be here in about half an hour - after he looks it over I will know more  about what I have to do.

I was torn between concern, not so much over the snakes, which I suspected would turn out to be a mild infestation of non-poisonous reptiles, easily dealt with, but over Mom's state of mind.  And frankly, I was a little dismayed over the idea of having to dash down to Yorktown earlier than planned--I was going down anyway for her next cataract operation, and in the meantime, I had hundreds of books strewn all over the floor that needed to be sorted and put back on the shelves, not to mention packing for Bouchercon and getting the house ready for a week-long family visit that begins almost immediately after Bouchercon. 

But a subsequent email from Mom reassured me that all was well after a visit from ZooPro, the pest removal service:

The man from ZooPro was very reassuring that there was only one snake skin in the basement - not the dozens that the furnace guy had implied.  Marilyn [a cousin] had heard of ZooPro - they had been called to remove an alligator from some pond over in Norfolk.  They  think that someone brought a tiny one back from Florida and had it for a pet until it grew so big they had decided it wasn't fun to have around so turned it loose in the river.  He will come back Monday and stop up some places that crickets can come in and another guy will spray for crickets.

I presume it's the man from ZooPro who's coming back, not the errant alligator.  Though if he was well mannered and promised to rid her of snakes, Mom would probably not mind the alligator. The reason for the war on the crickets is that Mom has an unusually large infestation of them, and they're attracting the snake(s).

So I'm breathing a sigh of relief.  I finished up the book sorting yesterday, targeting about 900 of an estimated 5500 books to be sold, donated, or otherwise released into the wild.  And now I can tidy the house for the houseguests and pack for Bouchercon in peace.

Well, except for the woodpecker that has returned to continue its daily assault on the wooden siding of my house.  Too bad ZooPro doesn't have a northern Virginia branch.