“Stuck up by Santa Claus first thing on a Monday morning!” Millie Mason’s double chin shook, and she glared at Sheriff Abner Peters before pointing at the empty display cases for the fifth time. “Gone. Thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. What are you going to do about it?”
A perfect office space, located directly between his home and that of his boss/former assistant Natalie Teeger, and the declaration by Natalie and San Francisco Police Captain Stottlemeyer that Adrian Monk is standing in his new detective agency, is not enough to break Monk’s ability to deny the truth. Or accept change. He’s had a rough week though, considering that his attempt to reconcile with his former girlfriend, Ellen Morse, proved to be an epic failure.
Christmas is just around the corner and I bet most of you will be baking at least one batch of cookies. It doesn’t matter if they are sugar cookies, gingerbread men, or snicker doodles. It doesn’t even matter if they are made from scratch or out of a refrigerated package or a box mix. When Christmas arrives, there had better be cookies. (I mean, you do want a visit from Santa. Right?) Yes, Christmas is definitely cookie season.
As the Fresno Art Museum closes out 2014, it honors both its future and its past.
“We had a double celebration to commemorate both the holidays and our 65th birthday,” says Kristina Hornback, who has been Associate Curator at the Museum for almost three years.
The old man hunched over the battered grocery cart sought nothing more than protection from the biting wind. It was late afternoon, getting colder and he badly needed a place to spend the night. A graffito covered dumpster filled one corner of the alley, directly behind Donaldson's Furniture Store. The usual trash and litter covered the frozen ground around it, but today something else caught his eye, something he had been hoping for. A large shipping carton of heavy cardboard, big enough for him to sleep in.
As a man of a certain age and retired on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Wilson McKenna is making a resolution towards living a life far more open to friends and family. Perhaps that's a decision made a bit on the fly, as he has just boarded a plane to the Big Island in order to help his friend Alexander find the niece who has recently gone missing.
In 2013, my favorite new series was M. L. Brennan’s Generation V, and I really liked the second book, Iron Night. Now, here comes Tainted Blood—delicious!
Every day, I pass the house. No one lives there now. It’s on the edge of a canyon that wind funnels through, and sometimes it sounds like cries and moans are coming from the house. They told me to keep away. Someone told me the house was haunted, that some nights, there had been sounds like harsh laughter, and lights flickered on and off through the cracked windows.
It had been a Daley tradition dating back four generations. Christmas morning, each child received three identical gift boxes from under the tree. In two of the boxes were practical gifts such as socks or underwear, but the third contained that special present the child had asked for from Santa and wanted more than anything in the world.
Recently a friend introduced me to Bob The Cat, probably the most famous cat out there right now besides Grumpy Cat, especially in the UK. There are two full length books about this amazing cat--A Street Cat Named Bob and How He Saved My Life, and then the more recent release of The World According to Bob. Both are written by Bob's owner James Bowen. These books are now on the top of my list for favorite books ever!
