I was looking at my flag and thinking about tea. As in you could drink Boston Harbor for maybe ten minutes. Yes, that’s a slice of chocolate cake in my hand...

In August I won’t be able to stand in front of this hydrangea bush – it bulges with HUGE pink blooms and is known throughout the neighborhood as the Hydrangea-that-ate-Cleveland.

I know, it’s amazing, it’s freaky, it’s unbelievable, yet it’s here and we must accept it, and shudder --- 2018 --- Yes, you read the numbers right, it’s nearly to the 2020’s, nearly a hundred years since the 1920’s. And what do the 1920’s make you think of? Dancing the Charleston, short skirts, clever stockings, bobbed hair, everyone drinking their brains out and smoking their lungs into pulpy gray yuck? Women led the way – it was a time of wonderful expression of freedom and this is what it looked like and danced like and cut its hair like – (alas, smoked like). As for the men -- ‘hey, it’s really sweet to look at a woman’s legs and not be thought a perv.’ Remember before WWI, women wore corsets, petticoats and dresses brushing the ground. And they never smoked and they tippled in private. What will happen when the clock turns to 2020? My prediction is there will be a complete resurgence of everything from the 1920’s, including clothes, dances, hair styles, speak easies. And the media, the fashionistas, movies and books, advertising, etc., will be portraying the roaring twenties and you and I will eagerly embrace any and all things roaring.

Poor February, a meager, nearly scrawny month of the year. It’s barely hanging on to month-dom. Let’s do something for weedy February, something awesome, something significant, something majorly fun, so February gets to enjoy our active brain-time for at least one year. Let me know what you decide to do if you join this program to Immortalize February.

The Ides of March is nearly here, at our front doors, staring at us through the window, ready to waltz in and spit in our eyes or pinch our earlobes. Be careful, the ides aren’t something to mess around with, except for minions, who are their best friends.

DID YOU KNOW???? No, no, don’t guess, let me tell you right this minute: THE SIXTH DAY, the 5th Nicholas Drummond/Mike Caine BRIT in the FBI thriller, is out RIGHT NOW, waiting to leap into your arms at a book store or downloaded on your iPad or audio-device or your cell phone –- and that brings up a question: If you’re reading an exciting thriller (e.g. THE SIXTH DAY) on your cell and someone calls you? What happens? What does the phone do? What do you do? Do you somehow answer and say – “I’m busy, I’m reading a great book, leave me alone, I’ll call you back –- sometime?”

What exciting goodies I’ve got for you, and you don’t have to send in a coupon, beg, or buy two-or-more to get the deal. Nope, the goodies are embedded right in this newsletter –- what’s easier than a simple click? Now, the trick is the preparation. You want either to be alone in a calm safe place or maybe allow your special loved one to share the experience with you. Below there are three goody links from PARADOX, the 22nd FBI thriller with Savich and Sherlock (out July 31st): two excerpts from PARADOX that will set your hair on fire, and the third goody -- the finale -- is a teaser video that will blow your socks off (so be sure you’re sitting down).

Happy Nearly Longest Day of the Year – the 21st: June is so amazing -- isn’t it wonderful to have bright sunlight hit your eyeballs at 6:00 a.m. and whoa – they pop right open? Because it seems much later and your bod is fooled into thinking, wow – 12 hours sleep! On the reverse side, if you go to bed early, it’s still light out and you feel like a child sent to bed early for texting your BFF during dinner.

Let me say this about New York City – you either go with the flow and get into it or you go to a psych ward at Bellevue. Wall-to-wall people, lots and lots of tourists (I guess that would include me), so much noise -- in restaurants, on the streets, in the women’s rooms, SAKS shoe department (area code 10022 – shoes). Talk about something your brain will remember forever: leaving the Broadway show FROZEN and walking into Times Square at nearly midnight and it’s bright as day and cheek to jowl with folk, every single one talking and taking photos with their cell phones. (Yes, me too. I hope to post a short video of Times Square soon.)

It’s still summer, right? But it’s already happening – no more waking up with the alarm to see lovely sunshine pouring through your window. Nope, already it’s dark, dark, dark, folks, and when the alarm goes off, you think for a millisecond it must might be three a.m. I have an idea: let’s form a Morning Sunlight Savings Time (MSST), submit to Congress. Would that possibly stand for anything hinky? Maybe a new government agency? Okay, no more whining, I’ll just imagine what it would be like living in Lapland (without drugs), nearly nose-to-nose with the North Pole.