Hunting for a Diamond (a Touching Mother's Day Post)

Here's a great activity for Mother's Day.  I recently got this mail from one of the people I stalk on the Blogosphere.  (Apparently I'm not a very good stalker since he's noticed.)  Anyway, he's just recently published a book and as part of his book promotion he's designed this very nifty treasure hunt for people who love mysteries, intrigue and puzzles.  Oh, and diamonds.

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Hi Wendy:

I wanted to make sure you knew about an "armchair treasure hunt" I'm conducting to promote my novel The Tavernier Stones.  The contest is up and running at www.tavernierstones.com.

The prize is a one carat diamond, but I hope to increase its size, if the contest lasts long enough.  Please share this with anyone you know who likes puzzles, codes, treasure maps -- or diamonds.

The novel debuted 1 May and has garnered some good reviews, including this one from Booklist:

"As the legend goes, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a seventeenth-century explorer and trader, was robbed of a small fortune in precious gems that remain unaccounted for to this day. Using this intriguing premise as a jumping-off point, Parrish, a cartographer and gemologist, fashions an enjoyable thriller in which a cartographer and a rather disreputable gemologist join forces to solve the mystery of the fabled Tavernier stones. The author clearly knows his subject—the details about map-making and gemology ring true—and even better, he knows how to tell a good story. His odd-couple protagonists (John Graf, the Amish cartographer, and David Freeman, the gemologist and jewel thief) make an interesting pair of heroes, and their jaunty relationship gives the novel an agreeable, lighthearted feel. The story itself, which involves a race against time to find the stones, is intricate without being annoyingly elaborate. This is a quite good first novel that, one hopes, will launch a series of Graf-Freeman adventures."

Thanks for indulging me,

Steve

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Get to it. Maybe you won't even have to buy flowers for Mom this year. (And, no, this is not a paid ad.) Personally, I'm thinking maybe I should just get the book for my mom and then she can find her own diamond.

This year I was actually thinking of stealing my brother's idea for Mother's Day. Every year he brings her cut flowers from his garden and some kind of plant that he's dug up from somewhere that she doesn't already have. She always calls to tell me how fabulous her new garden addition is.

I am notoriously bad about the gifts I get her. They are almost always wrong. Although to be fair she has the same problem when buying gifts for me. What I've started doing lately is getting stuff that I personally don't like and I think I'm getting much closer to the mark.

Recently, her feud with the neighbor has escalated so perhaps I should get her a big stand of invasive bamboo to plant on the border of her property. Or maybe something that attracts ground hornets or rodents. Or I should bottle up some of the ants that won't stay out of my house and thrown them into the neighbor's yard like a Molotov ant bomb. That will teach her.

Happy Mother's Day!