Of the Sea and Tomatoes
Yesterday, in a fitting beginning to Autumn, I took the Victoria Star between Bellingham, WA and Victoria, BC. It’s a foot-passenger ferry that runs between May and the end of September, and if possible, the captain pauses for wildlife. It was a rare day. We were honored to see humpback whales, minke whales, orca whales, two kinds of dolphins, porpoises, seals, and a sea lion. Never in all my years in the Northwest have I witnessed such a feast of sea life! Not to mention a full moon rising over Mount Baker (which was in alpenglow) as we returned to the Bellingham harbor from Victoria. That should keep me warm through the winter!
On my return home, I discovered UPS had delivered the edited manuscript for INDEX TO MURDER, the 11th Miss Zukas adventure, which is slated for publication in April, 2008. So the next few weeks are definitely occupied. Like many other authors, I dread the last edits, that final letting go of the manuscript. Rewriting is a pleasure and many of us hate to see it end: just let me fuss with it once more, we think as it’s going out the door. I can make it better! But then, perversely, once it’s REALLY gone, it’s common to forget the book’s details, as we move on to the next writing project.
In the garden: I grew one tomato plant this year (see the photo to the right). Our growing season is often too short to harvest much fruit. Ah, but this year, my much pampered tomato plant grew to a lush six feet tall. By early August, gigantic round tomatoes weighted every branch. This summer, I was sure I’d be plucking juicy red tomatoes off the vine. Just as the first tomato lost its green to a blush of pink, powdery mildew hit and within 24 hours, the entire plant was dead. Nothing left to do with it butpull it out and cart it to the woods. Maybe I’d better devote myself to carrots and potatoes.
Have a colorful and beautiful autumn season. And please, your emails are such a pleasure. Keep them coming! jo

Delicious
I have mixed feelings about: del.icio.us.com. It’s a fascinating site called a “social bookmarking website,” and allows you to see other people’s favorite sites, share sites and bookmark sites by topic that you can access from any computer. For those of you from the printed world, it’s a bit like a popularized version of Social Science Citation Index. Why the mixed feelings when I enjoy wandering through the site myself? I think because it is another missed opportunity by librarians. As a whole, librarians are smart, gifted, and brilliant organizers. But as a whole, bold they ain’t. I'd love to see a site like this if librarians had applied their own organizational wizardry to it.
~~The library world is thrashing over their obligation to patrons these days, struggling to find a balance between being keepers of all knowledge and riding the tippy top of the latest trends. The danger in a prolonged search for balance is that sometimes while you’re wasting time searching, the world can render you irrelevant.

Good Reads
Helma is deep into This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. She’s admittedly unmusical, but she is fascinated by the science of how it ought to be. Ruth finished Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar; understanding philosophy through jokes, by Cathcart and Klein. She only read the jokes.