A large portion of 2010 was clouded by my hubby’s seven-month bout of unemployment. And I started out the year by parting company with my agent. Nevertheless, there were some moments worthy of acknowledgment before we send the year packing. First would be February’s snowmageddon. It was one of those things that’s better to look back on than it was to live through. Once the roads were cleared and the power restored, we had to travel to Confluence to shovel six-plus feet of snow from our camper’s roof. This involved snowshoeing into the campground, which was an adventure by itself. Continuing 2010’s fun with foul weather, in March, our local Sisters in Crime chapter ventured to Confluence (otherwise known as weather central) during a major flood (not part of the plan) for our weekend writing retreat. I can’t believe none of us have written a murder mystery story about that weekend yet. While the rising river vied for our attention, we did manage to have a lot of fun, eat a lot of food,...

I’ve lived my entire life on property that at one time belonged to my grandfather. My folks built a house on one corner of Grandpap’s farm. When I married, we built our house on another ten-acre chunk of it. These two lots are the only ones that remain in the family. Over the years, I’ve mourned as the rest of acreage was sold off to others. But some things didn’t change. The neighboring farm remained in the same family it had since long before I was born. Mr. C kept a large herd of beef cattle on several hundred acres. As I sit in my office at my computer, I look out my window to a view of his hillside. Pasture, some woods, and those beef cattle. Amazing how you take something for granted when it’s been there for decades. Mr. C is one of those guys you just assume will go on forever. He never changes. Except he is. He’s getting older, like the rest of us. His hips are bad, so his jaunts around his property are done on tractor instead of on foot. Still, he loves his herd of cattle. Or ...

Anyone who knows me will tell you I am not a fan of winter. I don’t ski or ice skate. I used to love to sled ride, but suspect I’d break something vital if I tried it now. At least if I tried some of the stunts I did when I was a kid. But that’s a blog for another day. No, I don’t much care for cold weather, snow, and ice. Hibernation has always seemed like a good idea to me. And when people ask me if I miss owning horses, I can honestly say, yes. I miss Jenny and Brandy and Gypsy. And most of the others who passed through my barn. However I do not miss breaking ice out of water buckets and chopping up frozen manure and sawdust to clean the stalls. This morning, though, I bundled up in multiple layers and headed to Mountaineer to visit my friend Jessi. The excuse was that we had Christmas gifts to exchange and I had Avon stuff to deliver to her. But I really needed to get my hands on a horse. Yes, I’m an addict and there are times when nothing else will quench the craving…twenty degree...

Today at Working Stiffs , I'm blogging about week 7 of Citizens' Police Academy. It feels odd because last night I actually attended week 10 of it. Since I'm only blogging at Working Stiffs every other Wednesday now, I'm behind. So while last night I heard all about the relationship between the police and the media, I'm blogging about drug investigations. Come check it out.

I figured I'm overdue for both a Photo Friday post AND an update on the cats, so here goes. While it's still not sisterly love, at lease we've reached a truce of sorts. Kind of a sisterly tolerance. And here's Skye taking a bath. Kensi doesn't look much like a kitten any more. Still acts like it, though. And she loves having her picture taken.

My “stuff” is ganging up on my wallet. I was going to say appliances or electronics , but it’s more than just that. First my trusty black-and-white laserjet printer’s drum went bad. I use the thing just about every day and have run a small forest’s worth of paper through it, so it was no surprise. But when I learned what a drum costs? Yeouch! For an additional $10 I could buy a whole new printer…same thing as I had, only newer and slightly upgraded. No brainer. I came home with a new printer. A week later, my more-than-five-year-old color all-in-one inkjet died. I tried printer CPR. Nothing. She flat-lined on me. I had used and abused that poor old thing. I bought it when my dad was going into long-term nursing care and we were dealing with legal and financial issues that required lots and lots of copies. I’m shocked it survived that first year. So I ordered a new all-in-one online, and the guy in the big brown truck delivered it to my door. It’s faster and easier to use than the old ...

Just about two years ago, the Guppies (Great UnPublished chapter of Sisters in Crime ) announced our intention to put together an anthology of members’ short stories. I decided to give it a shot and wrote a tale about a romantic riverside picnic ruined when a dead body floats by. I was thrilled when, months later, my story was chosen to be a part of the anthology. I worked with our editor, Ramona DeFelice Long , who has since become a cherished friend (and a fellow survivor of the 2010 Sisters in Crime Great Flood and Writers’ Retreat ). After the usual long, drawn-out query and submission process (which I had nothing to do with…thank heavens!) The Guppies Anthology: Fish Tales has found a publisher in Wildside Press! Here is a listing of the stories and authors: “Thicker Than Blood” by Leslie Budewitz “Secret of the Red Mullet” by Nancy Adams “Accidents Happen” by Jim Jackson “Identity Crisis” by Diane Vallere “Sleeping with the Fish” by KB Inglee “Feeding Frenzy” by Patricia Winton...

This was the week at Citizens' Police Academy I was really looking forward to: using the firearms simulator. No pressure because it's all pretend. Yeah, right. Come on over to Working Stiffs and find out how that went for me.

Today is the first day of deer hunting season here in Pennsylvania. For many, it’s a national holiday. Maybe even a religious holiday. Not for me. I don’t hunt. I cry when a dog or a cat or a horse (or Bambi) dies in a movie. The only way I’ll go to a movie where an animal dies if I’m tricked into it. We own a DVD of Dances With Wolves . I only watch it to a certain point, and then I have to leave the room. I own The Horse Whisperer on DVD, too. But I start it halfway through. Which is fine because Robert Redford doesn’t show up until then anyway. I can’t watch fictional animals die, so there is no way on earth I could go out and shoot a real one. But around here, I’m the odd-man-out. I grew up in a family of hunters. And I married into a family of mega-hunters. Hubby celebrates this day with his uncle and cousins at the family hunting camp. I’m happy for him. I stay home with the cats. Two small felines and I take up the entire queen-sized bed all night and love it. During the day, i...

I just saw my first snowflakes of the year. That’s not to say it’s the first snow we’ve had. I’ve been told by my mother and by my hubby that it has snowed a couple of times before. But I only this morning put my eyeglasses on during one of these flurries to see it for myself. I’m basically blind without my glasses. I used to wear contacts, but about ten years ago, something interesting happened. While my contacts still allowed me to see things in the distance, words on the printed page became blurred. Eventually, I couldn’t read at all. Unless I put on glasses. After five years of this, I concluded, since I do quite a lot of reading, I was wearing glasses most of the time anyway. So I gave up and switched to trifocals. However, if I’m bopping around the house, I frequently go with naked eyes. I can see fine up close. I can read. If I lean toward the monitor a little, I can work on the computer. But my whole world exists in about a four foot radius of my face. Beyond that, without corr...

Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving filled with family, good friends, too much food, and lots of love.

With all the excitement over Zenyatta and the Breeder’s Cup going on at the same time I was spending three weeks revising my racetrack veterinarian mysteries, I’ve once again been infected with horse race fever. It’s a chronic illness that first attacked my system back in the 1970s. It then morphed into several different forms including 4H horse shows, Quarter Horse shows, and trail riding. But the Thoroughbred Racing bug never goes away completely. It just lies dormant for brief periods of time. Yesterday, I indulged the disease and spent some time on the backside at Mountaineer where my friend Jessi Pizzurro trains. I was short on time, so I didn’t make it over to the track to watch the horses train. Instead, I just hung around the barn, listening in on conversations with owners, the equine dentist, and Liz, the exercise rider. I managed to snap some photos of normal morning life on the backside. I look forward to going back soon to help feed my fever even more.

During this week’s Citizens’ Police Academy class, Trooper Mungo put out a call for volunteers to participate in a training drill for the Pennsylvania State Police. It sounded interesting, so I signed up. The Active Shooting Drill took place this morning. Four of my classmates and I arrived at the assigned room and were given our roles and a sheet of paper telling the scenario we were to act out. It revolved around an employee with 20+ years of service being terminated (“downsized”). He left the building without incident, but returned after retrieving his handgun from his glovebox. He headed for the administrative office looking for the supervisor who fired him. One coworker was leaving the office to go to the restroom, saw him with the gun and ran to the front door. Another coworker in the hall yelled at him and was shot, but managed to crawl into the hallway. Yet another coworker was shot in the head and killed. That left me. I was supposed to be a coworker at my desk who hears the g...

Once again I'm over at Working Stiffs today continuing my reports on Pennsylvania State Police Citizens' Police Academy. I'm a couple of weeks behind since I'm not blogging there every week, so while I completed week #7 last night, I'm blogging about week #5. Honestly, I can't do the classes justice. The officers doing the presenting bring such enthusiasm for their work into the classroom, and I just can't fit all that into a blog post. I'm hoping I can show it in my next novel, though. And to further delve into that world, I've signed up for something that sounds fascinating. This Saturday I'll be a participant in a school shooting training drill for the PSP. The guns will be of the training variety, but I suspect the tension will be very real. I'm not sure what my role will be, but it doesn't matter. I'm sure I'll get a whole new perspective on these horrible events. Ah, the things we do in the name of research!

I announced three weeks ago that I was retreating into my cave—for TWO weeks—to work on revisions to two manuscripts. Since things always take longer than I expect, I finally finished those revisions today. It’s an awesome feeling to click “send” with two requested manuscripts attached to the email. Awesome…and terrifying. Now I wait. I don’t expect to be twiddling my thumbs, though. During those three weeks, my house has deteriorated into a sanctuary for dust bunnies. Newspapers have piled up at the front door. I’ve had to clear off the kitchen table just to make room to eat. It’s time to declutter and do a little cleaning. Plus I have a couple of magazine articles that are due. Okay, OVER due. I also had almost 300 emails to catch up on. But I’ve already thinned those down a bit. If I owe you a reply, you’d better email me again. I’m afraid I had an itchy delete-button finger today.

The Morning After Kensi came through surgery quite well. I brought her home around 4PM and left her in her travel crate for about an hour per doctor’s orders. She was a bit agitated. I’m not sure if it was from the drugs or from being stuck in that crate. Or both. But once I let her out, she started wandering around the house, exploring and making sure nothing had changed in her 9-hour absence. This morning I’ve given her the prescribed pain medication and she wolfed down her breakfast. Her post-op orders call for “no running” which makes me laugh. Yeah, right. Although so far her sore tummy is relegating her to a reasonable pace. And while she managed to jump into bed with us last night and climb to her favorite perch on the knickknack stand this morning, she’s not scaling grand heights as per her norm. So I guess all I can say is so-far-so-good.

Spay Day My little girl is growing up. Kensi, who came to us when we could hold her in one hand, is now a lean, mean mini-panther. And today she will be spayed. By the time you read this, I’ll have taken her to the vet’s office. She has to be there between 8 and 8:30AM. No food or water after midnight, which means she’s going to be very unhappy. I’m concerned about how to keep her from popping her stitches. She loves to rip and race around the house. She climbs the knickknack shelves and leaps from them like a flying squirrel. Will a little thing like surgery slow her down? I doubt it. More to come.

I'm sharing my Citizen's Police Academy experience again over at Working Stiffs . This time the topic is vehicle codes and crash investigation.

Skye and Kensi are still not what I'd call "friends." Kensi loves to torment Skye who isn't interested in rough-housing. But when things quiet down, Skye tolerates Kensi's presence pretty well.

I wanted to warn everyone that I’m going into hiding for a couple of weeks. I call it crawling into my cave. If our camp in Confluence weren’t closed for the winter, I’d head there. But instead, I’m here in my office (which is currently being invaded by those impersonator ladybugs). I’ve had a request from an agent for both of my racetrack mystery/suspense manuscripts. More on that later, but for now, I have two weeks to polish TWO manuscripts before I’m expected to submit them. So with a hyperkinetic Kensi kitten bouncing around and chasing the previously mentioned ladybugs, I’ll be holed up in my cave until further notice.