Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Email from Michaela Klomp:

Argl. How is it that as soon as I pay closer attention to what you’re
always talking about I find myself craving countless books or even
comedy cds. Bad timing :( Our car broke down yesterday; we only bought
it last year and we do have a one year guarantee that the engine will be
fine – but since it ran out of oil and we don’t know whether it should
have needed that much oil – we do check it from time to time – and
probably we couldn’t prove it wasn’t our fault anyway I am sure we’ll
just have to cough up the money for a new engine. Argl.

Rick – I checked out the Eddie Izzard site, listened to one of the
audios and decided to get one of the CDs as a birthday present for my
husband .. he’ll adore it, too, I’m sure, and I won’t have to justify
spending money we don’t have (see above). Only drawback is that I have
to wait until June!! Wish I could see him live.

Jenifer and Pam – I’ll start with the books of Alta, once the shock of
having to pay for the car has worn off. Until then there’ll be another
item on my endless wish list. Thanks!

Miss Mousey – I recommend hot elderberry juice with a dash of rum ..  
works wonders for me :) (and if it doesn’t help, it still tastes great
and warms you)

Michaela
  

    
ok, here i am after long absence.  my grandmother passed away, and we
had her funeral on Christmas Eve in Albuquerque.  very beautiful,
poignant Christmas.  everything was charged with emotion, and it seemed
as if i was watching everything through a soft-filter lense.  anyways,
i am doing just fine, and am back in swing of things. 

so my band has released our first EP, and i will be getting back to
y'all in the next few days as to how to order it.  if you're
interested, that is.  hehe.  

so hello and happy new year and whatnot and i'll be damned if Lord of
the Rings hasn't made my millenium.  

-Adriana
  

    
Adriane--I'm so sorry.  I'll send happy thoughts to you and your
family.
 
Michaela--poo!  I'm sorry about the car--here's hoping the warranty
will cover it.

They are, apparently, attempting to kill me at work.  I'm so tempted
to walk it isn't even funny.  In answer to Linda's question, I work at
a travel agency.  I was a switchboard operator until the layoff in
March--when they hired me back, they decided I should learn to work in
the production department as well.  So I am backup on the switchboard
and in production, which is the mailroom with an unpleasant twist--in a
travel agency, production is where the tickets are printed, assembled
and shipped.  Paper tickets are a lot more popular now, after the 11th,
which means UPS, Fed Ex, etc.  It was the head of the production
department who had surgery on Saturday.  Update on her--the surgery was
more extensive than they had planned--they wound up doing a
hysterectomy to make sure they got everything, but it looks good, and
she may not have to have chemo, just radiation.  Thanks for your good
thoughts--they're working!

So for most of the day, I'm the mailroom--the only person in the
company who knows how to do the job, which also includes office
supplies, which I'm about to learn how to order, the hard way.  Then I
have to do both mailroom & switchboard for her lunch, and the last hour
and a half of the day.  Basically, I don't know whether I'm coming or
going.

Right now, I'm *going* to bed.

Mary (reading Winds of Fury by Mercedes Lackey)
  

    
Well, the car's not paid off just yet. Have to get the bill and *then*
it's done... but still. I'm getting giddy over it. :o)

Michaela - can't have the rum, as alcohol and I don't mix, but the
juice sounds nummy - any idea where I can find elderberry juice in
ghettoland Oakland? 

Mary - My grandmother own her own small agency. I volunteered to help
out one summer and it was enough to put me off to the industry
entirely. I tend to like to do a lot of things at once, but I think
everyone who wants to work in a travel agency is required to have 6
arms, two bodies (minimum), two or three brains (to handle all the
multi-tasking), and at least three mouths, all working in tandem and
independently from each other. I'm not nearly organized enough in my
own head to do all that! I don't know how you're expected to. hugs.

And as much as I'd like to just say I'm off to bed because I'm tired,
I'm really more hungry than anything, so I'm off to raid the fridge.
  

    
Adriana: I'm sorry your grandmother's gone.  She seemed like quite a
lady.  On the other side of the coin, MUCHO CONGRATS on recording your
EP!!!  Let us know when we can get one.

Mary: I'm really glad your friend's surgery went well.  And many
sympathies re: your work insanity.  What would happen if you just told
them you couldn't keep doing this?  Hot tea and cinnamon toast beams to
you.
  

    
Adriana,  I'm very sorry about your grandmother's death. There are
some people who are like living history - my great-grandmother, who
died in September, was one of those, a flapper, and a maker of bathtub
gin -  and it's a tragedy when they are gone because not only do you
lose someone you've loved, but also, a lot of their stories go with
them. My sympathies to you and your family.
  

    
E-mail from Michaela:

Miss Mousey – Um. No idea where to get elderberry juice in Oakland
or anywhere in the states for that matter. In Germany it is very much an
old-fashioned traditionalist sort of thing – you normally are given
elderberry juice by farmer’s wives. Living in a rural area and
enjoying the occasional old-fashioned activity, we make our own juice
from the bushes around the house. If I had to buy some here, I’d
look for the kind of shop where they sell extra natural super-healthy
food, wrinkled apples, generally grubby looking vegetables that are as
sure to be without traces of pesticides as you are likely to find in our
times. They might have some. I guess I just assumed that you could buy
virtually anything nowadays what with internet and stuff ;)

Mary – wow. Good luck to you and your colleague. Find time to read
and forget about work once in a while.

Adriana – Sounds like you had a Christmas you aren’t likely
to forget. Sorry to hear about your Grandma. Still- congratulations are
in order as well; I wish you lots of fans :)

No news concerning the car except that it’ll definitely need a new
engine. The warranty might or might not cover it. Wait and see. If it
does, we just have to pay about 2000 Euro (rough estimate). If it
doesn’t we will probably have to look for another car and sell the
remnants of the old one.

Michaela
  

    
Just out of curiousity I did a search on Elderberry and came up with
this startling article on 20 people poisoned with the juice -
apparently they threw in the leaves and stems to the juicer as well,
which are highly toxic.

http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000311.htm

Here's an elderberry winery. You'd have to read to see if they ship
the stuff.

http://www.kotv.com/okt/elderberry.asp

And here's resource as well.

http://www.juiceworld.net/all_products.htm
  

    
my deepest thanks to all of you for your kind words.  everyone here
has been so supportive and kind.  you are all lovely people.
  

    
Adriana - please let me also tend my most sincere sympathy.  You've
mentioned her a couple of times here and I wish I could have met
her...she sounds wonderful, and I am terribly sad for you.

And I'm not trying to get in on the lovely person thingy.  :P  If I
were lovely, I would have managaed to get this posted sooner.

The guilty and sincere....

Ninave
  

    
Just a brief note of hello,... essentially just wanting to commence
with the handwaving, as we've both been struck by the need to grab
people at random and say: SEE!!
http://www.redplanetsw.com/personal/marssaxman/photos/2002-01-10-011767.jpeg


:-)
  

    
Neeeeeeiiiillll (imagine me whining piteously)--We *miss* you.  Hasn't
it been 10 days yet?  ;-)

Hope you've had a lovely time, wherever you are.
  

    
back this afternoon -- really tired. Stayed up late to try and get
onto a US time thing. Slept for two hours and then woke up as it was
morning back in Europe. Now up in the middle of the night and trying to
get back to sleep, and stopped by to wave at everyone. WIll look over
the last 50 messages tomorrow....

g'night
  

    
Hi Neil.  I'm up at almost 3 with less excuse.  I did have to go to an
office party down south earlier, but I didn't need to run my TiVo and do
computer things after I finally got home, really.
  

    
Oooooh, Mary has the power to invoke Neil :^)

Adriana - let me add myself to the list of sympathy-givers (though a
bit late - I've not been around much).  Your grandmother sounds like
she was a remarkable woman - thanks for sharing a bit of her with us. 
Congrats on the EP, as well!

Martha - that's okay, we'll let it slide this time.  Have a better
excuse next time though, okay - we can't just have you traipsing about
at 3am for no good reason............  :^p

Neil - welcome back!
  

    
Ooh, ooh, almost forgot - congrats, Kelly, the rings are lovely.  So
very happy for you and Mars.
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes Tue 3 Jul 12 10:14>
  

    
flashlight-behind-the-knees thing???  That sounds crazy enough to want an
explanation...

Now that you're back, Neil, are you going to tell us which EU country
with a Euro-coin-op net terminal you got to be on holiday in?

I want to be back in Europe.  I want to have had more than two days in
Venice.  I want to have had more than two hours in Amsterdam (although
two hours in Amsterdam was so much nicer than two hours in Schiphol, and
I'm glad I got brave enough to trust the zippy train to get me to and from
the city in time for my next flight, because it was completely simple and
very lovely to walk around a sleepy gray Amsterdam center and marvel at
how it really seemed to be a parody of itself, with every storefront
alternating between a sex shop and a 'coffee' shop...
though I can do without the overdose of Christmas cookies.
  

    
All: Onion Soup was such the happy, and I have all of one bowl left in
my fridge :) The mulled wine was gone by Monday *lol*. 

Adriana: so sorry to hear about your gran! Hope your family is hanging
in there, and I give you (and them) hugs. About the only thing I
remember from Albq. at Christmas-time were the luminarias... But I do
remember it was gorgeous.

Mary: eeep! and I thought the airline industry had sucked! (mainly
based on the week where we couldn't actually seem to PRINT the
maintenance manuals which needed to be sent to the FAA the next
morning). We must find you a teaching job, pronto... Speaking of, I
never realised how many of my friends were teachers until you, Emma,
Tzvia, and Hollyn were all sitting on Avril's floor during Onion Soup,
trading stories.

Michaela: I think I started with Jane Yolen's dragon pit books
(Heartsblood, Dragon's Blood, and a Sending of Dragons, most likely not
in that order) in my teens, after seeing the CBS Storybook adaptation
(which I think was done by Michael Reaves of Batman and Gargoules
animated fame. Okay, I'm a geek. I cross-referance EVERYTHING) and went
on the the Jenna books (I like the first one much better than the
second one tho). Briar Rose is a HUGE fave, as is The Wild Hunt (a
lovely little YA I think from Scholastic). I also have a few of her
anthologies--the Xanadu ones, and the folklore one is a HUGE fave. And
she's just nifty and peachy keen.

Neil: welcome home :) Hope the deadlines didn't prevent you from
having a wonderful trip!
  

    
(Incidentally, I couldn't eat onions for years, and I *loved* onion
soup.  So I finally had some a month ago, and it did indeed make me
really happy.  But I'm sure it wasn't nearly as good as Tara's.) End
incidental music.

Mary: Wow.  That was eye-popping.  Can you do that for parties, too?

Neil: YAY!  You're back!  You're back!  Now I can finally ask you that
question I've been wanting to ask you forever, and keep forgetting to.
 As soon as I remember to look up the word for it.  Hope you had a
loverly time, and got lots of great writing stuff.

Kelly: Congrats!  They look beautiful.

Hi! to Rick and Martha.

<abbess>: Having spent a *very* long 15 hours in Schipol one night
when I was 18, I'm positive you did the right thing.  But I'll have to
disagree with you on that last bit: it can't be the holidays without a
cookie overdose, even if they're not in Amsterdam.

-Pam
now officially Prequalified to spend a zillion dollars to buy a house
(and only hyperventilating a *little*)
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes Tue 3 Jul 12 10:14>
  

    
wow, that light thing still sounds bizarre with explanation.

Pam - I've spent the same 4 hours on the same layover in Schiphol probably 4
times now, and it wasn't till this one that I got brave enough to see
something besides the duty free shops.  I'm quite glad I did, but I wish
I'd had more time.     And woo hoo on spending zillions of dollars on a
house!  It's fun and exciting!  I try to think not of the amount the bank
will get from me over the next 30 years, but of how I'm paying about the
same amount each month as I was paying to rent an apartment, and eventually
it'll make a dent and I'll own a significant fraction of a house that's
worth money.  And I try not to think too much about the fact that our house
seems to have given us a 1 year grace period after which everything that
worked before has expired.  Ah, plumbing...
  

    
E-mail from Michaela:

Re elderberry juice: They threw in the stems and leaves?? If I had known
that drinking elderberry juice is that dangerous in the US, I
wouldn’t have mentioned it..

Kelly – the rings are lovely!! I really like the picture :) Make
sure you don’t lose them. My husband managed to lose his wedding
ring a few weeks ago and we were so sad. We even tried a metal detector,
but no chance. It is probably somewhere in the haystack or on the
not-so-little-yard or wherever. Our wedding rings were his parents’
rings made over. I am now being extra paranoid about mine.  Oh – a
keychain shaped like a pair of handcuffs? Hm.....

Sorrz .. sorry about that last slightly garbled post. Don’t know
why the characters didn’t translate as they ought to. I am right
now trying my luck with the US keyboard option – Neil, I know how
you felt. I keep typing y when I want a z. Such a nuisance. Without my
trusty mac and the keycaps program I’d be totally lost. Will I keep
it up? Mazbe.. let’s see how this post turns out. Took long enough
to write.

Michaela
  

    

Kelly!  I love the rings!
  

    
thankyouthankyouthankyou for all the nice thoughts, all of you.

kelly's rings are really good, and they look like you had better not
mess with that union.  it is so sad, Linda, about your husband's ring. 
i would be heartbroken.  i have noticed that sometimes when jewelry
has run its course with its owner, it will simply disappear never to be
found again.  maybe it will be good to find a new ring?

so, i finally got the Sandman Companion over Christmas, and i've been
reading it thoroughly.  one thing caught my attention and really
shocked me, and that's the assertion that A Game of You is the least
favorite story arc in the Sandman series.  whuh?  i love LOVE this
story and had no idea there was grumbliness about it.  am i alone in my
fandom?  (probably not, adriana, you are after all on the barking mad
gaiman fan board)   

Pamela, does this mean that changes are a-comin'?