KICK OFF CHAOS, A Super-Bowl Themed Sleuth It Yourself Mini Mystery

The Super Bowl watch party won't be right without Laura's lucky jersey. But its T-1 hour until the guests show up, and the jersey is missing. Can you help Callie find it for her mother in time to enjoy the game? 

This is a "sleuth it yourself" mini mystery with the solution at the end.

  KICK OFF CHAOS!

“Where’s my lucky jersey?” Mom’s frantic voice echoes throughout the house. As if things weren’t chaotic enough one hour before kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday, now this.

The big game means little to me.

Mom, on the other hand spends months planning the biggest party on the block. It’s not just the excitement of the game, or the heart-attack-on-a-plate buffet, or the gathering of family, friends, and “frenemies,” aka those who root for the opposing team. It’s also an opportunity to show off her lucky jersey signed by some famous quarterback. Don’t ask me who. He played decades ago.

“Callie, come help me!”

I head in her direction, passing the dining table pre-staged with chafing dishes, crockpots, hot pads, and bowls already mounded with chips. I snag one. There are some aspects of Super Bowl Sundays I do enjoy.

WHERE OH WHERE HAS JAYNE ORMEROD GONE?

 I've been in my writing cave as my focus has taken me in a whole new direction. This meme is worth 1,000 words...

Watch for exciting updates soon!

EVERYTHING YOU'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT FICTION CLASSIFICATIONS...BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK...

   

(Whispered conversation between two young ladies recently overheard in a library bathroom…)
          “Do you know anything about, you know…what they’re talking about in there?”
          “No. I’m pretty inexperienced when it comes to that kind of stuff.”
          “Me too.”
          “Is there some sort of book or something that would explain everything?”
          “You mean like an illustrated how-to manual?”
          “Yeah.”
          “Not that I know of. But I’ve heard some of the older girls talking.”
          “And?”
          “I think they’re talking like they know, but they really don’t know.”
          “So how do you learn?”
          “I guess you just learn by doing it…”

No, these young ladies were not talking about the facts of life. They were aspiring authors attending their first mystery writers’ meeting. Words like genre and sub-genre and novella had been bandied about like bits of gossip dropped at a high-society cocktail party, all followed by a knowing look and responded to with an I’ll-pretend-I-know-what-you’re-talking-about-even-though-I’m-clueless nod. It might surprise you to learn that these two seemingly unrelated topics do have a lot in common.

OH, THE PLACES I'VE BEEN

 <Originally Published October, 2011>

 

Congratulations!

Today is your day.

You’re off to Great Places!

You’re off and away!

 

So begins the motivational book Oh, The Places You’ll Go by the esteemed Dr. Seuss. The book was first published in 1990, years after my own graduation from high school, but if someone had given it to me, I would have scoffed. Why would anyone want to go explore that big scary world when everything I wanted/needed was right here in my small Ohio town? I planned to live in the same area–possibly the same house–where I had grown up and raise a whole passel of children who would wear the same unflattering Orange and Black school colors and then they’d grow up and have babies of their own and live right next door to me. In a word, I was wanderlust-less. So even if Oh, The Places You’ll Go had been available, its encouragement to go off and see the world would have been wasted on me. 

"PASSING DIRECTIONS...Which are in No Way Connected to Driving a Motor Vehicle

 

<<In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, I thought it appropriate to pluck from the annals of my military spouse newsletters a column I’d written about the finer points of table etiquette. It just goes to prove that I learn something new every day!>>

'Tis the season…for holiday gatherings which involve too much food and not enough etiquette, much like the one I recently experienced during a large gathering of our navy family. There were twenty people seated around one long table, which had been festooned with Lenox China, Waterford crystal and more forks, knives and spoons than I knew what to do with. But despite the formal setting, there were no butlers dancing attendance, so the meal was served “Family Style.” This requires the passing of the food around the table for each diner to pile mountains of gastronomic pleasures onto their own plate.

WHAT???? PALM TREES IN MAINE?

Palm trees in Maine? Yeah. Seeing is believing, right?

Not always. This is a little story about how you can’t always believe what you see…on TV.

No surprise that as a mystery writer I’m also a fan of mystery shows, a top fav being Murder, She Wrote starring Angela Lansbury (may she rest in peace) as mystery writer and killer catcher Jessica “J.B.” Fletcher. That show is set in the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine.

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT…A TRUE(ISH) TALE OF ALL HALLOWS' EVE EVE…

’Twas the night before Halloween and a thick fog rolled in.  So thick, I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, let alone the lamppost whose black paint had faded to a mottled grey, thanks to the constant sandblasting by the wind off the Chesapeake Bay.  So that’s how I ended up in the ER, with a goose egg on my forehead, on account of I’d been running, and smacked right into the damned thing.  “Why were you running in the fog?” one might ask. A valid question.

I’d had a phone call about seven p.m.  “A wine emergency,” my friend Riley Wilson proclaimed. Riley was eight-and-one-half months pregnant.  (Don’t ask me to convert that to weeks…I birthed my babies when everything was calculated in trimesters, not days) and for obvious reasons she’d sworn off all things alcoholic.  So at the end of her terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, she called me to drink the wine for her.  That’s my motto, “I drink for those who can’t.”  I’m a good friend that way.