I don’t have any kind of theme for this post.

I’m still following the news about Japan, tragic and scary. However, I have a friend on Facebook, a Japanese gentleman who I don’t really know, who makes the most positive statements about his country and his state of mind such as: “The government is taking care of it.” “It’s almost time for the cherry blossoms and all will be fine.” He also has a cat and has posted photos of it. I like reading what he has to say.

We have friends, a writing couple that we’ve spent quite a bit of time with, who this week flew to Osaka Japan for a reunion with American and Japanese people who built the Japanese version of Universal studios. Her posts about their trip and visit have also been on the positive side.

Hubby and I with our son and daughter-in-law went to our local Indian Casino for the Friday night buffet because I’d heard they had crab legs. I love crab legs. Even though this Indian reservation and casino are often in my Deputy Tempe Crabtree mysteries, I don’t venture out there often because both roads to get there are too darn scary. The one we take goes around sharp curves and over rises and dips that make your stomach lurch like an elevator that drops too fast. The Indians and people going to and from the casino drive like they are racing to get there or home. Son drove and he drives in L.A. traffic all the time so this drive doesn’t faze him at all. The buffet was great, best clam chowder I’ve eaten anywhere, but the crab legs came with no tools to crack the legs or poke the meat out. What a struggle. Daughter-in-law, who doesn’t eat fish, laughed while we ate and said she should have brought a video camera. When we go a next time, we’ll take our own tools.

From the buffet we went into the casino itself and son insisted we try the machines. Right up front I have to say I don’t like to gamble. I don’t understand the point of putting hard-earned money into a machine and pushing buttons. Son put $10 in and made me sit down and try. It was a penny machine and sometimes I won and sometimes lost, when I got it back up to $9. 98 I cashed out. Hubby did the same thing with $5. I used to like the old-time one armed bandits, at least I understood what I was doing while losing my money.

I’m the program chair for the Public Safety Writers Association’s conference http://policewriter.com coming in July. I’ve been working on panels because we promise everyone who wants to be on a panel that they will be. Not easy to do if they don’t fit for the panels that we’ve come up with. Now I can understand why at some conferences I’ve attended in the past I ended up on some panels with topics that had nothing to do with the kind of book I wrote.

Though I’m really trying to work on my next Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, it seems I’m spending a lot of time writing blogs–like this one.

And that’s what’s on my mind at the moment.

What’s occupying your mind?

Marilyn