Good works & immortality
Things are moving along with the LRK fundraiser for Heifer International. In case you haven’t caught this news, every dollar we raise on the Amazon and Cafepress stores by May 21 (Arthur Conan Doyle’s 150th birthday!) will be turned over to Heifer International, to be used to send beehives (or goats—we like goats) to poor communities around the world. It’s a great cause—and to show just how much I appreciate Heifer, I will name a character in the next Russell novel after one of the direct donors who sends Heifer two or more hives through the Team LRK page.
Here’s your chance, not only to do good, but to achieve immortality in the pages of a Laurie King novel.
Heifer’s Team LRK page is open here; the LRK Amazon page here; and the Cafepress page here.
And in the meantime, over at Myspace, Mary Russell continues to celebrate the Fifteen Weeks of Bees, explaining how she came to give her memoirs to Ms King. This, week nine of the Fifteen Weeks, finds the intrepid duo this far in the story:
In 1992 Mary Russell, having searched for someone to edit her memoirs, located the granddaughter of a childhood friend from San Francisco. However, before she could contact Laurie, the rural Sussex home that she shared with the aged Sherlock Holmes was invaded by, and I quote, “a ravening pack of Sherlockians.” These American enthusiasts (were they Brits, they would have been Holmesians) surrounded the house, forcing Russell to summon their neighbour Patrick, (grandson of Patrick the farm manager) and a member of the local dramatic society, who had once played a rather flamboyant stage Holmes. Russell and Holmes packed up their memorabilia and prepared their home for a siege. After dark, they installed the actor in their house to mislead the Americans, and drove away.
Week Nine:
The house in Oxford to which we retreated was in the northern part of the town, a tree-studded area of large brick houses inhabited by dons and their families. It is close enough to town that a stroll to the Bodleian and Radcliffe libraries, even with an arm full of books, is a pleasant interlude; it is far enough from the center that the wrangle of bells of a Sunday morning is amusing, not headache-inducing.
My house is like all its fellows on the street from the outside, with high walls on all sides, a gravel drive at the front, and a narrow turret glued onto one corner. The house and its garden are too nondescript for any passer-by to bother with a second glance, and as far as the neighbours are concerned, the owner is an independent older woman who spends much of her live traveling and working on her academic studies, which (it being Oxford) could be Romanian campanology or liver flukes of the upper Nile.
Once upon a time, Holmes had arrived at my student flat through an upper window, setting off an elaborate and circuitous traverse of Oxford’s roof-tops in the snow.
Fortunately for us, this time I was permitted to drive through the elaborate and circuitous city roads in the actor’s Mercedes.
Laurie,
I bought some Heifer chicks for Team LRK and hope that it will make the world a kinder, softer, fluffier, chirpier place.
I way I look at it, I spend about ten bucks to see a movie. I happily give up the cash for seeing two new movies this spring in hopes that it can do some good for others. I have a job (knock wood) and so this is a gesture that I can make. I sincerely hope that others will do the same if they can manage it.
Peep peep.
–Marjorie
And hey, everyone, there are other prizes for those who donate hives — check out the Team Heifer page! This is a great cause, and I’m delighted to make Heifer International part of my charitable giving for the year. Thanks, Laurie, for the kick in the pants (apt, considering the goats??).
On a different topic altogether (Sorry, Laurie–I do love reading posts here, and love your work, as you know, but that’s part of the genesis of this plaint): I really, really, really dislike the frenetically busy and always changing ‘Featured Content’ window on this site. It is totally distracting, and I seldom read it, because it isn’t what I come to the site for, but it persists in DEMANDING attention. I have recently changed from a strong reading glasses magnification to a weak one, as my eyes improve, but find that enlarging the screen works better than wearing reading glasses. However, this durned Featured Content window yanks the screen back and forth such that I cannot read even two lines uninterrupted if I have the screen image size increased even a little bit. This is hugely frustrating. Please see if your programmer can do anything about this. I know that the feature probably is useful to some people who come to the site, or somehow drives the search engine optimization of the site, but could it do it without yanking the screen around?
Thanks so much. Hope you’re feeling much better and all cold symptoms are fading.
For Christmas I give my great nieces and nephew books (surprise!) and a gift to Heifer, Inter. They know how much money they have to spend and make their choices from the catalogue. This year they chose a goat and two flocks of baby chicks. I give to Heifer monthly, but I’m glad to add bees as an extra gift in honor of our 15 weeks of bees.
The Heifer charity is such a great idea – very well chosen! It’s seems just a little hard to donate money if one doesn’t own a credit card (me …).