Hi. Remember me?
I am a crazy little fella known as Bevboy. I have this here blog, which I began in 2007 and which has over 3200 posts. My goal was to write something every day.
A few years ago, my now-deceased mother required surgery in her neck, to preempt a potential stroke. She was 79 at the time and had a host of other issues. I was granted some time off work to deal with the stress of her surgery and be there for her when she came through the other side, assuming she survived the surgery.
I blogged as normal. I wrote about this, and that, and everything else. I tweeted like a son of a gun. I shared things on Facebook. It was a way, once again, to give me a sense of balance and normalcy.
It was wrong.
When I got back to work, I was asked why I had had such a high profile while I was off. When you have these days off with pay, you're supposed to keep things quiet and not really draw attention to yourself. I felt chastened, even foolish, and promised not to let it happen again.
I developed a policy after that, that when I took a sick day, or some family illness days, something like that, that I would not produce a blog post that day. I do find myself sharing funny pictures on my Facebook timeline on these days, and maybe I shouldn't; but blog posts, in my opinion, and in that of others, should not happen. And they won't.
That's why you haven't seen a blog post for a week.
Patricia took pretty sick last week. I won't get into the details here, other than to say she is steadily recovering, but still not back to work. I plan to take her to her doctor's on Friday to see what's up, or whether additional meds will be required to vanquish this malady once and for all.
I thought my place was with her. Maybe I was wrong. Hard to say. Depends on what type of human being you are, I guess, which side you would take. But at any rate, I caught some kind of flu on Friday, a virus of some kind, and it knocked me on me arse all weekend. It was only on Tuesday that I felt relatively normal again. I returned to work today, which is why you are seeing this blog post.
I felt well enough yesterday to make a shepherd's pie from scratch. Valley roast beef as the base, with mushrooms and veggies and topped off with mashed potatoes. Tasted even better today when I had a nice slab of it for lunch. Do you hate me?
Oh, here's something neat. I have been writing about Jas. R. Petrin, the Nova Scotia based crime fiction author who's had dozens of stories published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (AHMM) over the last 30 years. I have been trying to track him down. He wasn't registered with the Writer's Federation of Nova Scotia and I could see no variation of his name on Facebook. I wrote the editors through the AHMM website, but heard nothing. I finally decided last week to put a message on the AHMM Facebook page, in the hope that the editors might see it and throw me a bone.
They wrote me yesterday, and asked me to send them a private message with my contact information. I did. They wrote me back and promised to pass along that information to Mr. Petrin.
This morning, shortly before I went to work, my smartphone informed me that I had a new email. I opened it up, and it was from Jas. R. Petrin himself! He has agreed to an interview. He has given me his home address, which is along the French Shore of the province. I can't remember the last time I was there, and now Patricia and I have an invitation to go to Mr. Petrin's house and discuss his career as a writer.
I am very much looking forward to it. Just waiting to read through the Petrin stories I have so I can take notes and use them in my interview.
And, to be extra nice, Mr. Petrin sent me a Word document containing every known story he has written over the last 31 years. I now know that his first story for AHMM was in '85, and NOT '86 as I had thought. I am aware of about 10 more Petrin stories today than I was, yesterday.
Pretty sweet, huh?
This will be the first Jas. R. Petrin interview I am aware of. He has little quotations here and there if you google his name. There is a brief piece he wrote a few years ago about the creation of his Skig Skorzeny, but that's about it. I will make sure that Petrin fans everywhere know about this interview once it's done. I'm so excited.
And, I'm so excited to be back. I've missed writing this blog every day. From what I gather, my 4.7 readers did, too.
See you tomorrow.
Bevboy
No comments:
Post a Comment