Category: humor

Dither for Fitness: May 2023 Newsletter

DITHER FOR FITNESS!

Hey, Senior Friends!

Do you have trouble meeting your daily goals on your fitness tracker? Well, worry no more. With Dr. Juliet Kincaid’s unique Dithering for Fitness tips, you will meet them all with ease.

dither intr v To walk back and forth without going anywhere.

Inherent Dithering

Your home will provide you with a surprising number of opportunities to dither.

For instance, most daily chores like making your bed and preparing meals inherently give you steps. My mom Susie Willman used to dust around, that is, run a cloth over the tops of chest of drawers, etc. every morning. My dad Homer D. ran a dust mop around the kitchen floor daily. Mom lived to the age of 94, and Dad to 87.

A personal favorite dithering method of mine is doing the wash. My home office where I am writing this advice column is a mere thirty-two steps away from the washing machine in the laundry room. But these steps add up with three loads, especially if I vigorously pump my arms for aerobic benefit.

 Accidental Dithering

Accidental dithering often involves forgetfulness.

Undoubtedly, you know these moments. For example, you walk from your living room to your bedroom. But by the time you arrive at your destination, you’ve forgotten what you wanted to do there. So, you have to retrace your steps in hopes you’ll see some clue that will remind you of what you wanted to do. (Extra benefits if you have to climb stairs!)

Sometimes, you lose things. Now where did I put my  . . . ? you ask yourself. This happens to me very often. I own at least ten pairs of reading glasses. I keep a pair in the living room, a pair in the kitchen, and two pairs on the family room. But about once a day on average, I get up from my computer in the home office and dither through the house, perhaps to answer the buzzing summons of the clothes dryer. When I come back, I realize that I took off my glasses and set them down somewhere. So off again I must go in search of them.

Like the other kinds of dithering, accidental dithering can have health benefits. These dithering steps can be aerobic and add to your active minutes, especially if you pump your arms. And misplacing your mobile phone very well might make your heart pound extra hard.

Another place I often accidentally dither is while shopping at the grocery store. Fairly often, I get as far as the frozen foods department when I realize that I forgot to get the romaine lettuce that I need for the dinner salads. So, all the way back across the store back to the produce department I dither.

But I’ve quit beating myself up for accidental dithering. All steps are good steps. All active minutes are good active minutes. Your fitness tracker doesn’t care where they come from.

And this brings us to the third type of dithering for fitness . . .

Intentional Dithering

I’ll close with a few examples.

Every morning, I dither out to the garage to fill the bird feeders before I dither out to the back yard to hang the feeders up. Every evening, I dither out in the back yard to get the bird feeders and bring them in. (I can’t leave them out at night because the squirrels and racoons destroy them.) 

On Trash Day, I dither back and forth between the house and the recycle bin at the curb with a forgotten item or two at a time.

At least once every day, when prompted by my fitness tracker to get a few more steps, I go out and, enthusiastically pumping my arms, dither up and down the sidewalk to the corner and back.

To your good health, my senior friends, and happy dithering. Best, Juliet

P. S. For listings of Juliet Kincaid’s books and stories, go to her author’s pages on

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/2z9z3b2y

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/57k5d6dj

Barnes and Noble: https://tinyurl.com/43x5fa7n

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/hpn5dp8b

Time Change Sunday: March 2023 Newsletter

 

Time Change Sunday: March 2023 Newsletter

Today, I did a little research in Wikipedia about the origins of DST and discovered that clever founding father Ben Franklin first suggested it way back in 1784 as a way to save money on candle use.

He also suggested people tax window shutters, ration candles, and wake people up at dawn by ringing church bells and firing cannons. To me, this seems a bit counter-productive as far as saving money goes due to the high price of cannon shells and other ammunition. But then, apparently old Ben had his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek when he wrote that letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris.

The notion of pushing the clock hands forward in the spring and backwards in the fall took a while to catch on. But it finally did in the United States during World War 1 as a way to save on coal.

Personally, when I was growing up in the 1950’s, people always said we needed that extra hour of daylight in spring and summer so guys could have more time to play golf after their 9-to-5 workdays and kids could play outside longer. Presumably, the wives and mothers would happily accommodate those activities by getting supper on the table in a timely fashion.

Also personally, I’m rather against DST. For one thing, springing forward never been consistent in this country, let alone in the world, so sometimes while traveling, through Indiana on I-70, for instance, where at least one county was a hold-out to DST, I’ve gotten confused about what time it is.

One argument in favor of DST is it’s good for livestock. Farmers vehemently deny this. I don’t know much about cows and such, but I can say that our cat, the only animal around the place, is oblivious to clock time, so he continues getting up with the birds no matter exactly when by the clock they start chirping outside.

It can get confusing. My daughter just came to ask me if I wanted to do Jazzercise this afternoon, but she didn’t realize that it was an hour later in the day than she thought because she hadn’t changed the time on the clock on her work table.

As an old person, I can attest to feeling a little off today with one less hour of rest last night though my fitness tracker claims I got 7 hours. (Liar!) So, I’ve been dithering around the house even more than usual today.

And once upon a time in the autumn, my mom and dad came home from the mall furious that they couldn’t get into Macy’s to begin their daily walk because the doors were bolted shut and there it was not even 10 o’clock! They were pretty embarrassed when I reminded them of the time change.

Recently, there’s been talk of putting the United States on DST year around or not bothering with it at all because spring forward and falling back messes big time with people’s circadian cycles and leads to more heart attacks and car wrecks. It’s like going through jet lag twice a year. Apparently two thirds of Americans agree. But we’ll see . . .

 

New for Juliet: February 2023 Newsletter

What’s new at our house includes the air fryer my daughter Jess bought me for a surprise Valentine’s Day present.

It turns out that it’s requiring lots more thought than I expected it to including where to put it. In fact, even that was a problem given the lay-out of our kitchen in our house built in the late 1940’s and added onto sometime before 1960 before the microwave started becoming popular in 1967 and wildly popular by 1975. My daughter and I soon learned that if we ran the toaster and the microwave at the same time, we would pop a circuit breaker and the lights would go out in the kitchen.

So, we wanted to avoid loading up the rather limited outlets in the kitchen and ended up moving Mr. Coffee out of his place on the counter by the door to the family room where he’d long ruled to the other counter next to the narrow door to the hall to the front bathroom and bedrooms. And of course, the coffee bean grinder, the jar of coffee beans, the filters, and the two Brita water carafes had to go there, too. Mr. Coffee and the grinder now have an outlet a piece. Still, I ended up tweaking that arrangement when I realized that the jar of beans logically needs to sit next to the grinder not on the other side of Mr. Coffee by the water carafes.

As for our new 16” wide, 14” high, 14” deep shiny behemoth that bakes, toasts, grills, and dehydrates fruits and veggies in addition to air frying . . . We parked it at the end of the counter by the door to the family room. A plus: there’s no cabinet above it and it has plenty of room to breathe in air on the sides and blow it out in the exhaust in the back. But plugging it in had issues. The maker of our air flyer gave it a super short cord that doesn’t actually reach to the outlet by the kitchen window above the sink. So, we had to plug in the power strip we’d used for Mr. Coffee and the grinder. We also plugged in the electric can opener that Jess bought me to replace the hand-cranked openers I had trouble with due to the arthritis in my fingers.

We also had to move some things. For example, we no longer had room for the Rolodex, coupons, grocery lists, and pencil cups on the counter, so we moved them into my dad’s old desk in the family room. To have a parking place for hot food, we moved the cutting board we used to keep by the sink over to the left of the air fryer and got out our extra cutting board for the spot close to the sink.

We spent quite a bit of time the day we got our air fryer educating ourselves about it. We read the Air Fryer + Oven Quick Start and User Guides. We perused the air fryer cookbook that I bought when I went to the store that day. I sent out a call to my Facebook friends for tips and recipes. Some of them happily obliged. Soon I discovered that an air fryer doesn’t actually fry. It works by sucking moisture out of food. We also found out that air fryers get so hot that probably we should cook our favorite dishes for less time and at lower temperatures than our old recipes stipulate.

The day after we got the air fryer, we tried it out, And, sure enough, we discovered that the medium setting makes toast too dark for us. (Our old finicky toaster-oven hasn’t been the same since one morning the toast caught fire. It was an alarming sight to see flames stand up in the back of that toaster. “Shut the door,” Jess shouted. And when I did, the flames went out for lack of oxygen. We banished that toaster, with its permanently darkened front door, to the room next to the kitchen from which it might depart on our next Trash Day.)

Using our cookbook, we’ve made tasty chicken tenders and a breakfast frittata. I did learn that really you should choose the lower of the baking times suggested by your cookbook after I cooked the mozzarella cheese bites an extra two minutes and the cheese oozed out all over the air fry basket and the bake pan below.

I’ll do better next time. And I must say that this old girl enjoys learning new tricks at her advanced age.

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Also new from Juliet: trade paperbacks of the expanded edition of Novel Basics, An Illustrated Guide to Writing a Novel and of Cinderella, P. I. First Case to Last. Both cost $9.99 exclusively from Amazon and have easy-on-the-eyes 14-point font.

If you prefer digital versions, they’re available wide from a large range of retailers including for Novel Basics

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/u3fmrjku

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/4jd9a9w3

Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/3zr54p6k

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/yetuh8bc

And for Cinderella, P. I., First Case to Last

Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/327m8md2

Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/uutf6ud8

Barnes & Noble: https://tinyurl.com/mvch3err

Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/2p9fdhj2

Until next time, all the best, Juliet

Wounded Knee: November 2022 Newsletter

Sometime in August, I wounded my right knee, perhaps by twisting it inwards too fast during an exercise routine. Regardless, this simple little injury has pretty much dominated my life ever since. How did it do that? Let me count the ways.

Appointments have taken away considerable time from the thing I love to do—write. These include a visit with a nurse practitioner; a visit to the hospital for x-rays on my newly injured knee and my chronically achy left foot; a trip to the drug store for a prescription grade pain-killer; a visit to an orthopedist; and two visits to a psychologist to talk about my depression about no longer being able to exercise by dancing with my daughter Jess four times a week, take long walks, and do yard work. Even dealing with the doctors’ office phone system was frustrating and time-consuming.

But like many things in life, this experience had its lessons. For one thing, I learned to deal with the nurse practitioner via the patient portal instead of the phone. For another, I learned to be patient with myself and listen to the experts when they tell me to wear a brace on my knee so it won’t buckle out from under me and to ice the knee up after I’ve been active.

(It was a bit of a shock when the NP and the joint specialist disagreed on what pain-killer I should take. After some research, I discovered all pain-killers can kill you via your kidneys or your liver, or your mind through depression and suicide, and I backed off on all of them. But recently, I went back on the pain med with the fewest lethal side effects.)

Also, I’ve made adjustments to my life. For example, for a while, I backed off of most exercise including my morning yoga routine that I’ve faithfully done for at least fifty years. Since I no longer can put pressure on that knee, when I get down on the floor, I often can’t get back up again without dragging myself across the living room to the closest chair, placing my hands on the seat of the chair, pushing my butt into the air to get my feet under me, and then slowly straightening up.

And my poor wounded knee has improved. I’ve worked my way back up to taking 7,000 steps a day. Sometimes I shuffle around the family room behind Jess during a streamed dance-exercise routine. And instead of getting down on the floor to exercise my core, I sit on a chair. Also I try to warm up to my day with some exercises I learned from the tai chi class I joined a few weeks ago. (Millions of old Chinese people can’t be wrong.)

I’m so not trying to walk to the park right now, but a trip around a block or two or three, preferably hand in hand with Jess, is quite feasible. When I can’t kneel to reach around in the back of a cabinet, I ask my daughter for help. Ditto when I need to climb on a chair to reach something high up in a cabinet.

So, my life goes on, slightly revised. And still, in spite of all this trouble from my wounded knee, I am VERY HAPPY to report that I’ve finished the most recent draft of Death in Shining Armor, my current WiP, in exactly two months from my birthday on 9/11 until November 11. And the book looks good. But I’ve temporarily set it aside to mellow while I deal with all the seasonal stuff. This year, the stuff includes a holiday giveaway I’m participating in. Here’s the deal.

You need gifts and we’ve got books.

The Kansas City authors who make up Of Books and Nooks are giving you a chance to win eight amazing books to enjoy for yourself or give as gifts! Just enter our holiday book giveaway for a multi-author, multi-genre book collection!
The winner will be selected at random on Dec. 11, 2022. Enter by Dec. 10, 2022. Your entry automatically puts you on each author’s email list for future giveaways, newsletters and release announcements! You will also receive updates on new posts on Of Books and Nooks. Winner must have a valid mailing address in the United States. No books will be shipped outside the U.S.
Good luck, and happy holidays to all!

February 2022 Newsletter: a troubled dream

What Troubled Dream Is This?

Usually I don’t recall my dreams, but I did remember the one I was into just before I woke up Friday morning.

I dreamed that Jess and were at the premiere of a Stephen Amell movie, and Amell himself of Arrow fame was there. He wore a pair of chinos and a tight short-sleeved shirt with a collar. His casual ensemble showed off his wonderful physique that this octogenarian has no business drooling over, but does anyway. The gorgeous guy, surrounded by a bunch of groupie dudes similarly attired, even smiled at us and beckoned to us to come along.

But we got hung up at the concession stand where some middle-aged man who needed a shave waited on us. He gave us a fight about what he should cook for us on a grill as time slipped past. This is taking too long, I thought. Finally in disgust, I dug in my purse for my wallet and then in my wallet for some money to pay him for his trouble. “This is taking too long,” I said. I only came up with a twenty — way too much —and a one — way too little — tightly folded together. The guy at the concession stand was just offering us some sort of fried bun when I woke up.

Now, at our house, we follow my daddy’s old Pennsylvania Dutch superstition that one doesn’t tell what she dreamed before breakfast, so by the time I finished my juice, bacon, toast with cream cheese and delicious raspberry and pomegranate fruit spread and described my dream to Jess, I’d figured out what it was trying to tell me.

Dreams often are absurd. For example, Jess and I don’t go to the concession stands anymore or movies during the pandemic for that matter. I don’t keep my paper money folded. Still, dreams often are our subconscious minds’ parables. And I figured out that mine was telling me I’m taking too long to rewrite the climactic chapter of my WiP, Die by the Sword.

But in the light of day, I can also see it was my fear that spoke to me in that dream. “Keep it up, give in to all the distractions in this troubled world, and you’ll never finish this book,” it said.

And then I was able to say, “Sometimes you have to put in stuff that doesn’t belong in the piece to get to what does belong. Once you get the story and the characters where they need to be, you can cut, cut, snip, snip. The book will be fine, just give it a bit more time.”

So, this is a long way around telling you that I’m not quite finished writing Die by the Sword this month, but I’m close.

Meanwhile, Mischief in March, Book 3 of my Calendar Mystery series that now includes the follow-up short story “Detectives’ Honeymoon,” will be on sale from March 11, 2022 through March 18, 2022 for $2.99 at www.amazon.com/dp/B06XR1STRN and for £1.99 www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XR1STRN. If you’ve already bought the book, please review it on Amazon and/or Goodreads. If you’ve already bought, read, and reviewed this book, please share this notice with your friends.

Please stay safe and well, Juliet

P. S. Please note that I’ve changed my mind about republishing all my books and selling them through Draft2Digital. There seemed to be problems buying them from assorted merchants like Barnes and Noble, and it was taking me far more time to format them than I had. So if you want to keep up with my writing and publishing, just check my Amazon author age at https://www.amazon.com/Juliet-Kincaid/e/B00DB4HWRG

 

Mystery and Romance in Old KC

Mystery . . .
Romance . . .
A Most Improper Honeymoon . . .
Join business girl Minty Wilcox and detective Daniel Price in old Kansas City as they sleuth, get to know each other, and fall in love in six stories that occur before, between or after JANUARY JINX, FATAL FEBRUARY, and MISCHIEF IN MARCH, the three novels in Juliet Kincaid’s Calendar Mystery series, in OLD TIME STORIES, a collection of fiction and nonfiction.
In prequel story “The Barn Door,” Daniel goes undercover to help an old man overrun by his young wife’s free-loading relatives. Daniel also meets a pretty gal called Minty. He’ll probably never see her again, he thinks.
In “Lost Dog,” a second prequel story, Minty saves a stray pooch from a mean neighbor. And as she looks for the dog’s owner, her thoughts wander to the good-looking gent she met the day before.
Skipping forward six months, Daniel lures Minty off on a mysterious streetcar ride that ends with a surprise in “Two Birthdays.”
The next year, soon after Minty and Daniel become engaged, they pursue “The 9th Street Gang” and discover some of each other’s finer qualities. (They also sneak in some canoodling.)
A few weeks after that in “Detectives’ Honeymoon,” Minty and Daniel find their wedding trip in peril because of a dead body they discover in their bed.
And in “The Shackleton Ghost,” published here and nowhere else, they search a house that might be haunted by a vengeful ghost. (They sneak in some more canoodling.)
In this snippet from “The Shackleton Ghost,” available exclusively in OLD TIME STORIES, Minty and Daniel, just returned from their most improper honeymoon on April 1, 1900, and Minty’s younger brother and sister talk about why Miss Whitmore doesn’t want to stay in the house next door.
“I know the real reason why Miss Whitmore doesn’t want to stay over there,”
Eddie said. “And it’s not because of that will business.”
“I do, too,” Peach said.
“So what is the real reason, you two?” Minty asked.
“She’s scared of the ghost,” Peach said.
“The ghost?” Daniel said. “What ghost?”
“There’s a ghost in the Shackleton house next door,” Eddie said. “Sure as shooting.”
“Is that your April Fool’s prank, Eddie?” Daniel said. “If it is, it’s pretty far-fetched. It might be even less convincing than my description of our wedding trip to the moon.”
“It’s not an April Fool’s joke,” Eddie said, raising his right hand. “Honest Injun. There’s a ghost over there and Miss Whitmore is afraid of it. It’s her guilty conscience. I bet old Miss Shackleton came back to haunt her.”
Indeed, Miss Whitmore might have good reason to feel guilty about the death of Agnes Shackleton . . .
OLD TIME STORIES also includes eleven nonfiction pieces about the real people and places that inspired Juliet Kincaid to tell the story of Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price from newly met to newly wed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could downright deadly a hundred years or so ago.
Five-Star Review of “The Barn Door”
“This short prequel story to the first book, January Jinx, is fun and introduces us to the two main characters, Daniel and Minty, before they actually meet. I especially like the descriptions of Kansas City in the 1900’s as well as the vivid descriptions of the characters. Read ‘The Barn Door’ and you will not be disappointed.” An Amazon Reviewer.
Five-Star Review of “Lost Dog”
“What a delight to find myself in ‘old’ Kansas City again with such wonderfully drawn characters. I feel I know them and would love to follow them along the street while looking for the lost dog’s owner and I could just push that old neighbor back into the bushes after rescuing the poor dog from her vicious beating. Oh, this author brings them so alive and that is what keeps me reading her stories.” An Amazon Reviewer
For a short time only, you can get OLD TIME STORIES for only $0.99 at www.amazon.com/dp/B07F4JL8D5 and £0.99 at www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07F4JL8D5 (and it’s always FREE on Kindle Select.)

Free fun mystery story

“The 9th Street Gang”
“Stop! Thief!” a woman screamed. Across the lobby, outside the New England National Bank stood a stooped woman in black and a raggedy little boy. The woman pointed to a fellow running up the stairs and shouted, “Come back here with my purse.” Then, seeming to notice Minty and Daniel for the first time, she said, “That man took my purse!”
“Hold this, darling girl,” Daniel said.
Minty took the shopping bag fragrant with the lunch they’d just purchased from the deli down the street and clutched it to her chest as Daniel sprinted off past the elevators.
After that, in quick succession, the boy who’d opened the doors for them whistled sharply and shouted, “Let’s get out of here, Mick!”
The little kid turned away from the screaming old lady and limped up to Minty. “Please, ma’am, could you spare a nickel?” he said. “I ain’t eat nothing yet today.” He gazed up at Minty with heart-breaking blue eyes.
“No time for that now, Mick,” said the boy who’d held the door for Minty and Daniel. He snatched the shopping bag out of Minty’s hand and pushed past her to the door.
“Hey!” Minty said. “Give that—“
In their first case together as a detective couple, business girl Minty Wilcox and the dashing Daniel Price pursue a gang of thieves plaguing Kansas City in February 1900. Distractions include the objections of their boss to any show at all of their affection for each other inside the office and out and Minty’s wayward thoughts about the secret married couples keep to themselves. Join the fun, mystery and romance of this Calendar Mystery short story that takes place between the events of Fatal February and Mischief in March. And along the way you’ll meet the son of a famous outlaw.
Praise for “The 9th Street Gang”
If you wish for something pleasant to get your mind off the lately awful news, delve yourself into the story of three little hoodlums that steal this story from the endearing main characters and enjoy the tidbits of Kansas City history. Amazon Reviewer
Get “The 9th Street Gang” for free at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B079YYVTTX

Two Free Stories for the 4th of July

Banker Hector Jones hires detective Daniel Price to get the goods on his young wife’s free-loading relatives on the July 4th weekend in 1898 in “The Barn Door,” a prequel short story to Juliet Kincaid’s cozy historical calendar mystery novels and stories. After solving the case, Daniel Price, still in disguise as a traveling salesman, wanders over to the fairgrounds and . . .
 
A banner drooping between two posts at the corner of a baseball field across the street announced that Kansas City would play Omaha in Exposition Park at 3. Many tents and pavilions, most marked with red, white, and blue bunting, stood inside the oval fence of the racetrack between the ball field and the ruined Exposition Hall. Fiddle music came from somewhere.
 
Perfect, Daniel thought. Again clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, he urged the mare across the street. Just as he stopped the wagon at the curb close by the picnic area, a little girl ran up.
 
She wore a white dress and a wide white bow in her blond hair, not the white blond of Mrs. Jones and her family, but a golden, honey blond. Once the child read the words printed on the side of the Wabash wagon, she turned around and ran away again. “Minty! Minty!” she shouted as she disappeared into the crowd among the tents.
 
Minty? Daniel thought. Why is that little girl saying that?
 
Soon the child returned, holding the hand of a woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat, white shirtwaist and skirt. “Pretty please, Minty,” the little girl said. “Will you buy me something from the Wabash Man?”
 
“I might,” the woman said.
 
I guess that female is called Minty, Daniel thought as the woman and the little girl came up to the wagon.
 
Daniel jumped down from the wagon, swept off his straw boater, and bowed. “How do you do, miss?”
 
When the woman got close, she lifted her head, and stared at him out from the brim of her hat. She had beautiful amber eyes, and she was young and so very pretty that Daniel momentarily forgot that he was supposed to be extolling Wabash soap for its cleansing quality. “I beg your pardon for asking, miss, but is your name Minty?”
 
“Why, yes it is,” she said.
 
“That’s a very unusual name. May I ask how you came to have it?”
 
Five Star review of “The Barn Door” from Amazon reviewer
“If you have never read any of Juliet Kincaid’s calendar mysteries you are missing out. This short prequel story to the first book, January Jinx, is fun and introduces us to the two main characters, Daniel and Minty, before they actually meet. I especially like the descriptions of Kansas City in the 1900’s as well as the vivid descriptions of the characters. Read ‘The Barn Door’ and you will not be disappointed.”
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On July 5, 1898, a future career as a business girl as a typist/stenographer weighs heavily on Minty Wilcox’s mind. But distractions ensue when her sourpuss spinster neighbor lays abuse on Minty’s kid brother, sister, and a lost dog. Her mother’s disapproval and several flirtatious gents don’t help Minty in reaching her goal in “Lost Dog,” a prequel story to Juliet Kincaid’s Calendar Mysteries. After Minty solves the case, she and her younger sister walk home from downtown Kansas City and . . .
 
As they walked along Ninth Street, Peach said, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry one of those streetcar men.”
 
“Well, Peach,” Minty said. “That’s a long time from now. You’ll change your mind many times before you get married.”
 
“Okay,” Peach said. They walked along in silence a little longer before Peach said. “You know, Minty. Those streetcar men weren’t nearly as handsome as the Wabash Man. Maybe I’ll marry him instead.”
 
“The Wabash Man?” Minty said. “Oh yes, the traveling salesman we met yesterday.” She smiled as she recalled the man’s bold dark eyes. She probably shouldn’t give him a second thought because chances were good she’d never see him again. Besides, as the business girl she intended on becoming, she didn’t plan on ever getting married. But still she said, “Not if I get him first, little sister.”
 
Five-Star Review from an Amazon reviewer
“What a delight to find myself in ‘old’ Kansas City again with such wonderfully drawn characters. I feel I know them and would love to follow them along the street while looking for the lost dog’s owner and I could just push that old neighbor back into the bushes after rescuing the poor dog from her vicious beating. Oh, this author brings them so alive and that is what keeps me reading her stories.”
 
Juliet Kincaid’s cozy historical mystery novels and stories tell the story of business girl Minty Wilcox and dashing detective Daniel Price from newly met to newly wed and beyond in Kansas City, a place that could get downright deadly a hundred years or so ago. “The Barn Door” is FREE for the 2020 Fourth of July weekend at www.amazon.com/dp/B073G7ZXMP and “Lost Dog” is also FREE:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0752SWBG1

Tantrum on Time in the Age of COVID-19

I gather from assorted newscasts that lots of people have lots of time on their hands as they shelter in place. So they’re bored and they take to drink or binge watch The Good Place on Netflix or obsessively play Sudoku and Solitaire on their smart phones. Well, personally, we don’t have all that much spare time at our house.

Take online grocery shopping, for instance. Our service proudly keeps a tab on how many hours our shoppers have saved us, according to them. These savings average about an hour per shopper per trip. But the time-saving bit is pretty much a crock. Here’s why I say that.

Now, I’m systematic about grocery shopping and always make a list on a notepad I keep in the kitchen. I’ll add a dozen eggs after my daughter has made an omelet for breakfast for dinner and a bunch of bananas when I’m down to one. And just before I head off to the store, something I haven’t done myself in more than a month, I quickly check the vegetable, fruit, and cheese drawers in the fridge to see what I’m short on, ditto the pantry and freezer. I confer with my daughter about anything she might need. So overall, I hardly notice the time it takes to create a grocery list.

But the thing about online shopping is that you have to transfer your list to the shopping app and that takes time because you have to say what replacements you’ll accept for an item they don’t have or if they should skip it altogether something like a specific brand of Neufchatel cheese for which you will accept no substitute because you’ve tried them and they’re just a little slimy. Yucko on the toast. And thanks so much, but nonfat cheese is even slimier. Double yucko on the toast. (If you’ve read any of my previous pieces on shopping, you know how picky I get when I shop.) My daughter usually handles putting the groceries on the app and texting back and forth with our shopper in the store, but I stay close by so she can ask me about the Neufchatel or whatever.

And another thing about time and online shopping . . . When your shopper is actually in the store and shopping, you have to go through the list again, explaining by text why you won’t accept a substitute for the hand soap you use because you have sensitive skin. (FYI: All those 20-second hand washes, even with my preferred soap, have wrinkled the backs of my hands and made them shiny too, so my skin looks like some kind of weird baklava.)

Also, I know the stores we order from better than most of the shoppers, so they get lost sometimes and need to text for directions for items like tortillas that I would go right to if I were shopping in person. So overall we spend as much time online at the store, or maybe more as we would if we were actually in the store and shopping. Plus, I miss the retail therapy and the pleasure of smelling the peaches to see if they’re really ripe.

And once the shoppers deliver my stuff, I have to process the perishables by spraying the packages of frozen foods with disinfectant, for instance, before I hustle them into the house and into the freezer or in the case of produce like apples and clementines giving them a bath in soapy water. This takes time, too.

But really the time required is beside the point and neither the shoppers’ fault nor the service’s either. It’s the pandemic and that insidious virus. And thanks to those shoppers going out into danger in my stead, I feel fairly safe from it. And I am better off than if I were out shopping on my own. So again, thanks is due to those who help me.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to go play Solitaire Go on my iPhone for thirty, forty minutes, maybe an hour . . .

Fun in Old K.C. only 99 Cents

As their wedding day fast approaches, Minty Wilcox has some questions about her fiancé Daniel Price. Did he really kill someone? Why has he never told her he’s rich? And for goodness’ sake, where will they go on their honeymoon?

 

From Minty’s journal . . .

But back to my story of naming the Irish setter puppy that Papa has given us as a wedding present . . . My fiancé, the outrageous Daniel Price, the man that I am to marry in less than a week, told me in no uncertain terms that the dog must be named Butch! I suppose he was just teasing, but still . . . Butch?

Even Papa said, “Why, Daniel, giving this sweet girl pup a thug’s name doesn’t bode well for when you two start giving Laura and me grandchildren.”

(That reminded me of possibly being called “Mrs. Elmer Horace Frankenfurter-Engishdeiler” that at one point Daniel said was his real name, so I giggled a bit over it.)

After Papa said that, Daniel backed down and said, “Well, let me think about it then.”

He does seem to like the pup very much. After he half scared the poor little thing to death with his clown’s wig and white face, he took off the wig, went upstairs to the bathroom and washed up. When he came down again, he looked fairly normal except for the bruise around his left eye.

Speaking of that, my brother Kit said, “Will you have a black eye for your wedding day?”

“I might,” Daniel said . . .

Mischief in March is Book 3 of the Calendar Mystery series that tells the story of Minty Wilcox and Daniel Price from newly met to newly wed and beyond a hundred years or so ago, when life in Kansas City could get downright deadly.

For a short time only, Mischief in March is $0.99 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XR1STRN and £0.99 at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XR1STRN
(And it’s always free on Kindle Unlimited.)