Happy Valentine's Day-the only day that makes this cold snowy month bearable. We now have the snow we missed over Christmas--thirteen inches plus, on February 2nd. Of course by now my thoughts have turned to spring. But the snow is here to stay for a while, and we have to deal with it. By the way, what makes a record snowstorm bearable is a pecan coffeecake and cups of hot tea. My Foxglove Corners heroine and I have that in common.

In mid-January I bought myself a belated Christmas present, a rare vintage Royal Doulton collie figurine. There are many collie figurines out there, but this one was unique, modeled after a real champion, Ashstead Applause. First, a little backstory.

Several years ago, almost forty, I bought this figurine at a store in Windsor and treasured it even after it acquired a mysterious chip in the ear. Then came a year when misfortune overtook me. I was hospitalized and spent six weeks in a nursing home. My neighbor hired a woman to pet sit my collie, Holly. She came one day and never returned.

When I came home I found out why. She had broken my collie figurine which I kept on a shelf in my study, a room she had no reason to enter. She'd made a clumsy attempt to glue or paste it together again, but it was no use. My once beautiful figurine was a pathetic ruin.

Still I couldn't get rid of it. I moved it to a bookcase in the basement. In this terrible time, I'd lost my real collie, Holly, and didn't have the heart to grieve over a figurine. But to this day it still upsets me when I see it.

Once I found it on eBay for $400, about a fourth of its original price, but decided I couldn't pay that much. The other day, while Googling collies, I found it for a more reasonable price. The store had one in stock. I lost no time ordering it and am currently waiting for it to arrive. I'll find a safe place for it and never let a stranger have access to my home again.

Update and Mystery. After not having received the collie by the time I expected it to arrive, I decided to return to the site and e-mail the shop's owner. However, after an hour's search, I couldn't find the site or references to Ashstead Applause. There were plenty of collie figurines, but not the one I'd ordered. Or had I? Now, if this were a Foxglove Corners mystery, I'd suspect the supernatural was at work, or maybe that I had dreamed it. Since this is real life, I'm going to try again to see if Google will lead me to it and wait to see what this week brings.

While I'm on the subject of collies, my guest blog on Marja's Mystery Blog is scheduled for February 2nd. I call it "Crazy over Collies" and want to thank Marja McGraw for giving me an opportunity to write about my heart breed and how it's a part of my fiction.

You'll want to look for Marja's latest Bogey Man mystery, How Now Brown Cow, with a McGraw original cover. It'll be up on Amazon in about a week.

My new Foxglove Corners mystery, The Quicksilver Collie, is coming along nicely at almost one hundred pages. In this book you'll learn more about Rosalyn Everett, the collie breeder who abandoned her dogs for days, believing she'd only been away from home for a few hours. Jennet, of course, has two more collies in distress to help and Christmas to celebrate with her family and friends. This gives me a chance to live Christmas all over again with her.

My copies of A Ghost of Gunfire arrived on my doorstep on February 2nd, after a January 1st release. I don't think it takes that long for people ordering a single copy. An E-edition ordered from Amazon, Barnes and Nobel or Smashwords, arrives instantly on Kindle-at least it does on mine.

By the middle of December, I'd finished all twenty-one books in the Pennyfoot mystery series by Kate Kingsbury and went on to the Bellehaven series by Victoria Kent, one of Kate's pen names. Actually Kate Kingsbury is a pen name. There were only three books in this series. I'm currently reading a few contemporary novels of romantic suspense set in exotic locations. In the meantime, many of my long-time favorite authors have new books due for release throughout the year. I've pre-ordered all of them.

I read for an hour, sometimes more, before bed, and having a wonderful book waiting for me at the end of the day is something I look forward to.

Next month, I hope the snow will be a memory and we will begin to see grass and the first stalks of early spring flowers. I'll see you then.