This week I’m going through the edits of book two, tentatively called The Graduation Present

The story is very, very, very loosely based on the year I spent in Europe back in 1970, a time when two wars waged – the Cold War and the Vietnam War.  However it was a different war that still cast a dark cloud over the continent.  World War II.  The heroine/narrator suffers from overactive imagination syndrome thus when she is thrust into perplexing situations, she overreacts. It doesn’t help that her guardian is a paradox.  On one hand he is a hopeless romantic, a sappy sentimentalist and gregariously generous.   On the other, he has a bawdy sense of humor that borders on lewd, cannot be pried from Happy Hour, and he may work for dark forces of evil lurking within the CIA.

What results is a comic romp through Europe to solve a mystery which may not exist as our heroine, Miss Riley Ann O’Tannen, learns that wars cast long shadows but somehow people survive.  They might not survive with the same hopes and aspirations as privileged Americans, but they do survive and usually with a realization of what is really important.  Pub date is in May 2014.

On to Pretty Kitty news:

Despite all manner of wooing, Pretty Kitty has not been convinced to come inside and join the family.  She’s getting treats, Friskies and rice flavored with garlic (hubby assures me that cats can’t resist rice flavored with garlic but I have my doubts.)  However, she still runs when we try to pet her.  Sigh.  Hubby is about to give up hope.

The squirrels continue to be pissed that hubby is cavorting with Pretty Kitty.  They’ve taken to chattering angrily at us from tree limbs.

I end with the sad story of this mourning dove.  He used to have a mate (mourning doves mate for life) however then the hawk came along and now the one sits in the cherry tree near where his mate was killed and waits.  Apparently hope knows no end for the mourning dove.