Wordsmithonia Radio --- The Songs Currently Stuck In My Brain

There are a few songs that I can't seem to stop listening to lately.  Whether I have Youtube pulled up on the computer, listening to iTunes, playing a CD in the car, or humming in my head, they are songs that, for whatever reason, seem to be stuck on repeat.  Some of them are new, or newish, some of them are fairly old, but every single one of them are relentlessly bouncing around my head, including a television theme song (because of a game I'm playing). So with no further ado, here is the current soundtrack of my life.

The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Synopsis From Back Cover:

How little you know about the people who are closest to you... This is what ran through Elizabeth Bell's mind on the night of April 18th.  Sara Gittings, the family nurse, had just been brutally murdered.  And all thoughts of a homicidal maniac running amok were banished when the evidence revealed that Sarah had know and trusted her murderer.

Who would have anything against timid, sweet Sarah? But as Elizabeth Bell was about to discover, her staid and orderly household harbored more than one suspect with a motive - and, unfortunately, more than one victim. 

It's been a long time since I've read a Mary Roberts Rinehart book, so I felt it was long over due.  For the most part, it was simply that I had run out of "new" books at the used bookstore.  Every time I went in, I would check for them, but ones I hadn't seen before stopped showing up.  When I found The Door, I jumped for joy, went home and put the book away.  It then languished on the shelves for almost a year, and while I would think about it, I would get busy with something else.  The one time I did pick it up, it wasn't holding my attention so I put it away, and didn't pick it up again until another bazillion months had passed.  I picked it up once again, not that long ago, and while it still wasn't holding my attention, I forced myself to persevere and get it done.

I'm really not sure why I didn't get into this one as much as I have most of her other books. The mystery itself was well plotted out, the characters were engaging, and the tension was thick enough that a power saw would have been needed to cut it in half.  Elizabeth was a hoot to read, and I loved how involved she got into he whole thing, including the destroying of evidence, so I can't lay the blame at her feet.  I'm kind of at a loss to explain why this one didn't do it for me.  Maybe the pacing was a little slower than the previous books.  Maybe the weighing sense of claustrophobia that I've enjoyed with some of her other works, wasn't as present in this one.  Maybe I just didn't like the title and that fact it takes most of the book to understand where it came from.  I don't know, I'm kinda of grasping at straws here.

And I don't want to leave you with the feeling I didn't like it, because by the time it was over, I did.  It's not my favorite and I probably won't read it again, but it will stick around collecting dust for years to come.  Much in the way I feel about Agatha Christie's work, I would still put this one up against most of the cozy, cookie cutter stuff being written today.  I just wouldn't put it up against my favorite Rinehart books.

Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

August sucked!  I'm not willing to say it's the worst month I've ever had, but it definitely ranked in the top five worst months of my life.  Because of how the month hit me in the gut, I wasn't around as much as I would have liked, and I'm deeply sorry for it.  I'm sorry for all the posts I never got written, and I'm sorry for all your posts that I never got to read.  It was an exhausting month, and I simply didn't have the energy to log in the way I wanted to.

It's always a busy time at work, but for whatever reason, this coming Tuesday will be my first day off since July 17th.  My average work week was right around 60-65 hours, and I barely had time to do laundry, let alone read.  If it had just been a crazy schedule, I could have coped a bit more, but it wasn't.

For those of you I'm friends with on Facebook, you already know that I lost my grandma on August 12th, just three days before my birthday.  It's been hard to deal with, especially the guilt of not being able to get back to MN for her service, and for all the visits I put off over the years, swearing I would get up to see her sometime soon.  She was a terrific lady, and I'm going to miss her for the rest of my days.  There was some other family drama during the month, but I'm so tired of thinking about it, that I'm not even going to mention it further.

Now that August is over, work will start going back to normal, 50-55 hours a week and a day off every week.  The weather will start cooling down, and hopefully my equilibrium will soon be back to normal.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to get back to posting on a regular basis, hopefully this week, and I promise I'll get by your blogs, and catch up on with what I missed.  So have a great week and an even better September.