This has been an unusually hectic and exciting Spring for my wife Jeanne and I. And trust me we’ve had some pretty hectic ones in the past.

In mid-May we traveled down to Washington, DC where she had a solo show of her oil paintings titled “Oceans” in a gallery in the new artsy section of the city on 14^th street NW.  Ten years ago the  area was a warren of cheap auto repair shops and used car lots. Today it’s been transformed, as art galleries vie for rental space with restaurants and trendy boutiques.

We brought down eighteen paintings four of which were large canvases measuring five feet by four feet.  In the process of trying to figure out how we were going to get these from Portland to DC without incurring humongous shipping costs we discovered that the cargo area of our Honda Pilot was designed by some clever Japanese engineer to precisely accommodate an 8’x4’ sheet of plywood lying flat.  The big canvases fit perfectly and left room for the smaller paintings as well as our luggage tucked at the rear (Actually, for all I know, the engineer who designed the interior of Pilot might have been Lithuanian, Peruvian or Passamaquoddy but since the car’s a Honda I assumed Japanese which I suppose constitutes some sort of unintended racial profiling.)

Anyway, of the eighteen works, Jeanne has sold five so far and the show will be up until June 25^th so she might well sell a few more. Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to  have walls big enough to accommodate the four big paintings so in spite of remarks like “Gee, I wish I had space for one of those'” I guess we’ll be putting them back in the Honda for the trip back to Maine. (NB:  If anyone who reads this blog has a big house and happens to be in the DC area, you might want to take a look. They really are terrific. Even if you’re not in DC or live in a 500 square foot studio apartment with small walls you can check out Jeanne’s work on her website www.otoolehayman.com )

Her next solo show will be back in Maine at the Richard Boyd Gallery on Peaks Island opening on Friday, July 5^th with an opening reception on the 6^th from noon to four PM. So we’ll soon be shipping another batch of paintings out to the island.

Meanwhile, lots of other things have also been going on.

In May Jeanne and I made our annual transition from our house on Peaks, which we rent in the summer, to our apartment on Munjoy Hill in Portland.

Lured by the siren song of earning extra paychecks, I also continued doing some freelance writing for Garrand & Co., a Portland ad agency.

On June 5th, the French published the hardcover edition of my first novel The Cutting, changing the title to Donne Moi Ton Coeur (Give Me Your Heart) which I kind of like.  After I finish writing this blog I have to move on to writing my responses to an online interview with the French publicist for L’Archipel, my publisher in Paris.

Last month, I also finalized the contract with my new US publisher, Harper Collins, for an October 1^st North American launch of McCabe/Savage #3, Darkness First which will be coming out first in ebook form.

And now, as we approach those so-called lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, I absolutely, positively have to get my tail in gear and  buckle down to finish a big chunk of the the fourth in the McCabe series (tentatively titled The Crossing) which is about two murders that happen in the same family one hundred years apart.

I could go on but heck, as they say, busy hands are happy hands. I think.