Day 3

I’m in a birthday club that delights in finding moderately inappropriate cards to give to each other–did I mention we’re almost all over forty? So the challenge is finding the ‘just right’ card to truly identify the struggles we women face–sagging body parts, memory loss and the ever increasing dependence on legally addictive stimulants (chocolate, anyone?) I found a great one for my friend, Traci. I’d go into details but my parents/and or/teenagers might read this and neither of them appreciates that I have any knowledge of sex so I really shouldn’t elaborate. Today we met for a breakfast party which, to a confirmed breakfast-ite, was the perfect way to start the day, particularly one that gets a bad rap like Friday the 13th.  Cheryl served cheese grits, sausage/egg casserole, a warm fruit salad and I brought cinnamon rolls from the Butcher Shop bakery. This was a meal designed to carry me through lunch.  I vote for more breakfast parties.

Right now, I’m deep into reading the latest installment of one of my new favorite series by Lauren Willig. The Temptation of the Night Jasmine. The main character is a completely relateable modern girl reserching her Harvard dissertation in and around London. Sounds like dry bones, I know, except the subject of her search are English spies during the French Revolution. (Anyone remember the infamous Scarlet Pimpernel??) She discovers that spies didn’t leave a lot of information lying around, so when she stumbles onto the family archives of a charming older lady she has hit the proverbial jackpot with one caveat. The handsome young heir to these letters is defensive, occasionally rude and totally fascinating to Eloise. Colin and Eloise dance between faded letters and potential romance is one on-going plot line that stretches through out all the books. Another are the various identiies and activities of these flower named spies. The novels are written with two concurrent stories–one quite modern between Eloise and Colin, the other the real time experiences of our dashing spies. I thoroughly enjoy Ms. Willig’s extensive historical reserach and her flair for interpersonal conflicts, from two distinctly different time periods.

Night of the Jasmine is particularly unqiue because the hero of this story has just returned from military service in India and is tracking a nefarious, occult tinged group who are responsible for the death of a British colonel.  Mix that with a winsome young heiress and well, I can’t tell you what happens next because I’ve just started reading. But, I know I’m going to be hooked until the last page.

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