Day 84 - Cooking

Tomorrow it's supposed to be cool enough to bake.  Therefore this evening, instead of writing, I made two batches of bread dough.  I will make two more tomorrow, as I need to fill the freezer to get us through the excess heat of summer.  Friends and family have been living off store bought bread and bagels.  This is not acceptable.

I will also have to make cookies and maybe brownies for the freezer.

I always do this during cool weather, but unfortunately people raid the freezer while it's still cool and eat it up, rather than actually telling me "hey, we need bread."  Which means we run out of bread when the weather gets hot. I feel like I need to put "Don't use until..." labels on it.  Or maybe mark it as "haggis" and hope they don't see through the ruse.

I was going to tell you about the new "aggregation" blog idea today, but I would rather try to get a little writing done before bed, so I will leave that until tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm reading the Richard Lockridge book that was the transition of the Shapiro stories from the fluffier suspense stories I enjoy so much, to the police procedural whodunnits the series became after Frances Lockridge's death.

Murder Can't Wait is actually a book in the other main series the Lockridges wrote -- featuring Captain Heimrich of the New York State Police.  These were all little more straight puzzle mystery with the police procedural bent.  Not your modern gritty dark police procedurals, but just whodunnits that followed the police investigators around, and maybe threw in a little personal stuff from their lives.  While this series kicked off with an overlap with the Mr. and Mrs. North series, it has a less cutesy tone.  (Actually that first Heimrich appearance was in Murder Out Of Turn -- the second or third Mr. and Mrs. North novel -- which takes place "up north" at the North's vacation cabin.  I'll be reading that one next.  I vaguely remember it, and it seems to me that either Weigand or Heimrich meets his future wife in that story.)

I'm also reading a more current book -- Who In Hell is Wanda Fuca? by G. M. Ford, the first in the P. I. Leo Waterman series.  This was one of the series I discovered in the 1990s, only to see it disappear immediately after I got hooked on it.  I was happy to see the books are now back in print with Thomas and Mercer, and priced reasonably.  These are fun hard-boiled P.I. stories.   Takes place in Seattle, and the detective, who has his own colorful background, has even more colorful sidekicks. (In particular a team of drunks who assist him in his investigations.)

Links and real reviews later on. (Maybe to be posted in the new blog.)

See you in the funny papers.