100 Percent, Doc

Today the first three Sarah Tolerance mysteries (Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner) return to print as print and e-books, each with a gorgeous new cover and a new essay about the Miss Tolerance and her world.

And in October will come the first publication of The Doxies Penalty, Miss Tolerance's fourth adventure.

Note: for technical reasons it might take a while for the print edition of The Sleeping Partner to be available while Ingram sorts itself out. But it's coming. And the e-books have no such problem.

Yeah, I'm pretty delighted to have them available again at all the usual bookselling suspects. Onward!

... somehow I keep finding myself singing those words to the tune of "Fascinating Rhythm." In other news, I knew we always need the rain, but I'm kind of over this weather.

YMMV, of course.

The new furnace is in, a day earlier than expected. And... wow. Rather than an occasional **whoosh** of hot air, everything is just a nice, even 68°. Everywhere in the house. And it's run and scheduled from the inevitable app. There are many things in the future to deplore, but this is nice.

Really, that's all.

This weekend our 15 1/2_year journey with Emily came to an end. We got Emily when she was three months old from the SF SPCA. For the first ten years of her life, I was the alpha parent. For the last five years my husband Danny sort of took over. During that time I've written about Em and her antics, foibles, and demands. In the last year or so she started really showing her age (although on a good day she was still capable of dragging one from one end of our hilly San Francisco neighborhood to the other, looking for humans to charm and treats to demand). But in the last week she started to decline sharply. Her already-wobbling hindlegs gave out, and then her front legs, and it was... time. The vet who came to our house was kind and gentle--I think there's a special place in heaven for someone who does what is essentially hospice work with pets--and he was very sweet with us as well. He listened to our Emily stories and understood our familial we-deal-with-stress-with-laughter reaction. And then she was gone.

The house is quiet. I can hug my husband without Emily immediately responding with "Excuse me? You're supposed to be hugging THE DOG" (freely translated from barking and nosing in between us. I may be able to take a fur-free breath some time this decade (it turns out I'm allergic to dogs... who knew, until we had one?). But the house is still infused with her silly, ridogulous spirit. And can you believe the side-eye she's giving me?

Nothing reminds you of your housekeeping shortfalls like the imminent arrival of the refrigerator repair person.

Our neighborhood has a mourning dove which I have heard occasionally( (it may have more than one, but I can attest to one, at least). Up until this last week I have never actually seen the bird, but in the last week it has decided to come check out our yard. It's a lovely, graceful looking bird--and yes, dove gray. And it only seems to show up when Emily is in the sunroom ready to go into full alert. Poor Elderdog has rear legs that are failing her (when she eats I watch as her butt slumps lower and lower) and she has become entirely farsighted... but when she sees that dove she is galvanized, darting to the back door, barking furiously, desperate to go out and capture the intruder.

The dove is in no danger of capture, but it's kind of nice to see that Emily still considers that she's in the game.

For Women's History Month Australian writer Gillian Pollack enlisted a month's worth of guest posts on women and their history, as is only appropriate. Mine went up today (March 28), and rather than being about a woman who changed the world, it's about my great-great-grandmother, Lois Selucia Hobbs. Because her experience is one of the millions of her time: a small life. And I don't think the small lives should be forgotten.

Anyway, it's https://gillianpolack.com/womens-history-month-guest-madeleine-robins-2/.

... I am stress-baking today. Sourdough pretzels, to start. There may be more--am considering sourdough pasta--later in the day. (I had a quart of sourdough discard when I started working this morning. With the pretzel dough proofing, I now have 24 ounces, so using the stuff up is still on my list of To Dos).

Everyone stay safe and sane today, and tomorrow.

Yesterday afternoon my sewing machine stopped working. Like, the shaft refused to go up and down (I'm sure there's a more engineering-like way to say this, but that's what happened). So today I took it in to my repair shop. Apparently, with the amount of use I've been giving the poor thing, a massive amount of lint had built up under the , got impacted under the bobbin, and stopped everything cold. Nice chap at the shop pulled out the lint and the machine worked again. Also: I should change my needle "after every other project" which is a hard metric to define when I'm just endlessly making masks. I said, "so every two weeks?" He nodded. So that's sorted.

Also yesterday, I started a batch of sourdough cinnamon sugar doughnuts. it's a somewhat involved process, in that it requires an overnight proofing. but the only rising agent was the sourdough itself: they rose like gangbusters (these things are the width of DVDs). The texture is distinctly not cake-like: they're crispy outside and fluffy inside. They also (for my money) don't have much flavor other than the cinnamon sugar. So if I try these again, I'm going to mess about with the sugar in the batter itself (and maybe add more cardamom), and I'm going to make them smaller. Overall, I consider the experiment successful, and I'm bundling most of them off to send to my daughter, who was expressing a need for doughnuts.