Like Cards and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Ya know, it's hard to write with Adventures in Odyssey playing in the background.  The boys listen to them at bedtime, and I think I enjoy them as much now as I did when I was their age.  Such great stories!  Such distracting stories.

I once gave a boy a Valentine that said, "Valentine, I like you a lot.  In fact I'm head over heals in like with you!"  and on the inside whatever cute little animal was on the cover, was upside down.  There aren't a lot of options for "like" cards.  There should be more, because people throw around the word "love" far too carelessly.  Perhaps I should break into this niche market, creating Valentines and other general "I like you" cards for those wanting to express their true feelings -- not an exaggeration of their feelings.  File that thought for someday after someone else has already become rich off of it.

Anyway, that's what Odyssey brought to mind this evening.

On an entirely different train of thought, I'm so enjoying "The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party" by Alexander McCall Smith!  I capered happily through the first eleven books in his "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series a little over two years ago, and thought I had come to the end of the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, but -- oh joy! -- I recently discovered there are two more books!

Here, one of the amusing passages that typify the series:

     In his view... women... wanted machines to work, but they did not necessarily want to understand why they worked or, more important, why they went wrong.  Love was usually quite enough to stop people going wrong, but would not always work with machinery.  One of his clients had just demonstrated that.  She had brought in her car, which was behaving erratically.  "I love it," she said.  "I am kind to it.  And now it has decided to turn against me.  What have I done, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, to deserve this?" 

     "It is not love," he had said.  "It is oil."

     That is what Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought about how women treated cars.

One last thought:  I thought "bemuse" meant basically the same thing as "amuse," but to a lesser or more curious degree. It doesn't.  It means to befuddle, confuse, confound, mystify.  Good thing I looked it up before describing the previous passage as bemusing.  Amusing.  That's what it is.