May 7, 2010

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!

8 comments:

  1. Definitely a bottle of ants for her to throw into her neighbor's yard!

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  2. Just email MY mom and get all of her "neighbor revenge" tactics and customize them for your mom. Using Pat's ideas would keep your mom busy for weeks.

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  3. No bamboo! I don't wish that on my worst enemy.

    Enjoy the treasure hunt.

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  4. Hunt and win a one carat diamond! I'm in!

    If your Mom likes to garden maybe a gift card to a Nursery or Home Depot placed inside an empty flower pot :)

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  5. Have you seen that email going around of a picture of a stone fence with a cut out design that unbeknown to everyone, when the sun shines through the cut out, the shadow is a row of penises with balls. Now THAT'S the kind of fence your mom needs to put along her yard line just to piss the neighbor off!

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  6. I am baffled by the US Mother's Day being so late and not at the same time as ours. I'd go for the ants. You can never have too many ants.

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  7. "The prize is a one carat diamond, but I hope to increase its size, if the contest lasts long enough." -- witty fellow. Your stalking is understandable.

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  8. I sent my mom a card by priority mail, since I was sending it on a Wednesday and our post office is extremely slow. Of course, later that day I realized that I had my dates mixed up and Mother's Day wasn't for another week and a half.

    The great thing about it? It STILL didn't get there in time!

    Fun Fact: My mom lives approximately 2 1/2 hours away from me.

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