The Bald Truth

Or "Hair today, gone tomorrow". Well, actually October. What am I blathering about?

Fatima had this great idea to raise money for cancer research. Our staff is challenging other area restaurants to a fundraising competition. For our part Fatima has said for $5000 she will shave her head and for every $2000 raised after that one of our staff will follow. We have 4 volunteers so far from our staff (yeah, including me) and one of our suppliers has volunteered. Since Fatima knows a lot of people with $$ the first $5000 should be easy, the rest maybe not so? Selena has also volunteered to be sheared. Mum said "been there, done that", so she will donate $$. I am picking up the pledge sheets today on my way to work so expect to hear from 'lenie or I fairly soon.

The grand event will be at the restaurant, probably 28 September. Oh yeah, add "fashionable hats" to my Christmas list . . .

Authors' "Other (Better?) Works"

I recently reread a book of historical mystery short stories inspired by Ellis Peters & her Brother Cadfael series. One of the writers, I believe it was H.R.F. Keating, mentioned how disappointed Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters) was that her other characters were not as well known. I really liked the Cadfael series until I read them back to back and realized how formulaic they are.

Recently I needed something to read so I picked up an Ellis Peters non Cadfael tale - Death to the Landlords (the title suited my mood at the time) set in India featuring Dominic Felse (the son of Inspector Felse, her "other" series character). I could see a trace of the Cadfael formula (ie - there must be a romance), but it was otherwise very good. So good that I read an Inspector Felse as well. Now I must get more.

Sadly same happened with H.R.F Keating's Inspector Ghote, 3 or 4 years ago I got derailed (pun intended!) reading the very transparently plotted Inspector Ghote Goes by Train and recently gave up attempting to restart it. However, Keating has another sort of police procedural series (no recurring characters) based on basic personality traits of the investigators that is a very good read. I've been through The Good Detective, The Bad Detective , and The Soft Detective since last week. Now I must get more.

Rude Awakening!

I worked dinner last night, came home and ate, then had trouble getting to sleep (note to self: do not eat dinner after 10pm). Finally, I put on one of my hypnosis CDs and was just drifting off when Ry came up to use the bathroom around 130am. I hear him swearing, then "MUM, the toilet is overflowing! Everywhere!"

Ry said it was about 10 minutes from the time he went to bathroom and until he heard "dripping" and came back upstairs. In that time the bathroom was flooded, water was coming out into the hall (onto the wood floors!) and as we discovered during our frantic search for towels, coming out of the ceiling downstairs. F*ck! F*ck! F*ck!

Luckily once the toilet was unplugged it was just a matter of drying everything. I'd like to know where the Hell all my towels went though. This morning the hardwired smoke detector downstairs(where the bulk of the water escaped) was making a loud buzzing, so I had to shut it off at the breaker. Somehow I don't think smoke detectors are designed to be submersible. The good thing is it was just water, not, umm, sewage, that was flooding. I only hope we got it up fast enough not to damage the floors. Sigh. . .