Thursday Thunks.

I love my family, but it's nice to have my routines back.

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Cameron first commented on it, but on spring break, we were finding candy wrappers all over the store.

Speaking of which, I once again several times saw (what I consider the sad phenomenon of) parents carrying large bags of candy turning down a request for a book by their kids.

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I don't know how they do it, especially in a store as packed as mine, but I think the customers can instinctively sense when I'm doing a good job of stocking. And they can tell when I'm slacking off.

What this means is, I often have to overspend by up to 15% in the slow months, say about a third of the year. I then make up for that in the busiest third of the year.

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Spring break used to be so easy to figure out. Oregon would have a spring break, counting Bend. Then Washington, then California, etc. Not necessarily in that order. Often they would overlap. But you could suss it out.

Nowadays, each school district seems to have it's own spring break, colleges have them at a different time, and so on. I've given up trying to figure it out.

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My brother Mike's taste in books turns out to be fairly different than me.

He's fascinated by southwest culture, so there are all those authors. He's brought a large stack of old Nero Wolf books. He tends to like British or other foreign mysteries. And most of all, he likes what I would call "set-piece" mysteries. The term often used is "parlor room" mysteries, but "set-piece" can encompassed a much broader range of regional type mysteries that have a kind of formula.

I tend to like the hard-edge, private eye or police stories that are more chaotic in plot. More action oriented, perhaps. I'm not sure if I can explain the difference. More based on flawed characters than a mystery "plot" per se.

There is a lot of crossover, of course.