emerging from the worst time of year

We've been getting some sunlight during the day for the last week and a half or so. Only a few hours per day appeared at first, but there's been a few days where there was no cloud in the way through the entire period when our East and South windows get sun!

That is probably why I have started to have a little more energy in the day. Friday I cleaned the whole counter more thoroughly than I have since Christmas - putting away the trays and cutting boards that don't fit in the sink, hunting down the crumbs behind the stupid toaster.

The temperature dropped suddenly two nights ago, though, and the radiators were failing to catch up all day yesterday (it never got over 12°C/53°F in the bedroom, the coldest in the house) and all day I kept having to huddle up in a nest of blankets in my armchair because it was too cold to have my hands on top of the blankets to sew. It seems to be warming again this morning and is only a little below freezing. There's a lot of fresh snowfall from the weekend though, and the birds have eaten nearly all our peanuts. The bird feeders are constantly busy. Wax says we need to buy more right away so there is no break in our yard's supplies that could traumatize the little dinosaurs.

Golden Age Detective fiction: Piper's Murder in the Gunroom (NY 1953)

I've started reading this murder mystery because it was on Standard Ebooks and looked interesting.

This is about the murder of a well-known collector of antique firearms in the middle of his collection and the investigation by another collector. Many other collector characters appear, with facts about the hobby.

I love reading fiction that gives us a window into a scene of nerdy highly-specialized knowledge like this.

Long-time readers will know that I have dabbled in fountain pen collecting, but I was collecting them more with an eye to ordinary usage and functionality, not the kind of breadth or historical focus that the fictional gun collectors, and many other much more dedicated fountain pen collectors, bring to it. I have too many art and craft hobbies to focus that kind of time and money on fountain pens and a temperament that doesn't really like keeping ones around that I don't realistically intend to use. In fact, I have some more that I would probably give away except I don't have appropriate recipients (enthusiasts who would want them) and I don't have the time to spend figuring out how to resell them.

However, I've read enough about the hobby to have a mental outline of how this mystery could be about a collector with a collection of antique pens worth tens of thousands of dollars murdered with pen equipment (I'm thinking a hypodermic syringe - you need these for some cleaning and filling tasks; equipment stores sell them with the tips blunted so you can't hurt yourself easily, but obviously you could more cheaply file it down yourself, and that's what a frequent tinkerer or nib grinder would do). They could be killed by intravenous injection of an air bubble, like in Sayers's Unnatural Death, which is one of my favorite classics.

Of course that would look like natural death, so maybe something silly and showy like tracheotomy by sharpened nib would be better. I'm probably not going to write this because I don't know enough about that level of collecting. But I would like to read it.