That’s what the garden is.
In case you’re wondering, the white thing in the pathway is my trash can covering the mole trap. I don’t know if it’s worked or not — the contraption is scary.
And below is Steve’s new garden gnome. He’s been wanting one for ages. I don’t know why. But, it makes him happy, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?
The folks over at the Lit Blog Co-op had nominated Atkinson’s Case Histories as a Read This! novel a few months ago. It’s strange, because I probably would have gotten around to it on my own; I loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum (though I found Human Croquet hard to get into and Emotionally Weird just plain incomprehensible). But there’s something about feeling you have to do something ; it just sucks your motivation away. And thus I checked this out library a total of three times before actually reading it.
The novel is about three different past crimes. In the first, the youngest daughter in a family disappears one night. In the second, a college-aged girl is killed while working as a summer intern in her father’s law office. The third is about the sister of a convicted axe murderer who is seeking her sibling’s daughter. The cases are hinged together by the private detective put on each of these cases years and years later; he has his own tragedies and past mystery. And the resolution of each of the cases is shocking in its own way.
It was an ambitious novel, and I have to be honest and say that I’m not really sure what I thought of it. Sometimes it dragged. The first bit about the sister disappearing was a chore to wade through, for instance. Other times it sprawled, with its jumping around from character to character. But I read this a few weeks ago, and ultimately think it’s one of those novels that you appreciate more in retrospect.
There is, of course, nothing quite so tiresome as someone explaining why she hasn’t been posting more regularly — so I won’t bother, except to say that it’s been a crazy week with no end in sight. But spring is really here! We spent Sunday working in the yard; I cleared off the deck, started fantasizing about heirloom vegetables again and planted a bunch of seeds hoping that this year I won’t kill my container garden. I call them pots; Steve calls them torture chambers. Mean, but true. In any case, he has his hands full;we have a mole. He’s dug several holes in the backyard, and when we stuck a hose down one of them, it ran for 45 minutes before leaking through the containing wall. So he’s a man with a mission: to kill the furry little bastard. It’s very entertaining. Actually, I think the mole’s just moved next door; I was talking to Nicki over the fence when she looked down and said with some surprise, “Oh, I think I have a mole.” Yep — huge pile o’ dirt at her feet. How can something so small create such a mess?
