It was a wonderful day

The first color draft for the cover for my book showed up. Wow! It looks like a real book! Wayy too cool! I forwarded it around and got the full spectrum of responses. Some folks love it. Some folks hate it. I am touched that the people who hate it are going to some trouble to analyze the problems and offer suggestions to improve. I think that if I asked everyone who has read this book what was the most important scene from the book, I would not get two answers the same. It seems that when someone creates something, it becomes a sort of vessel for other people to fill with their own meaning. That is delightful to me. The book is a sort of literary Rorschach test.

So, having tabled the question of the cover (I DON"T KNOW!! I like it, but whatthehell do I know?) I worked away on the galleys like a happy little beaver untill my postal person arrived with a big smile on her face and a box in her hand. "You have a friend in Australia," she told me.

I ripped into that box like an aardvark tearing into a termite mound. Janette sent me a marvelous, beautiful, elegant, modernist cup that will be the PERFECT thing for my repeated cups of tea. And it's a birthday present. My birthday was in March. Thanks to Customs and overseas shipping, I get to stretch my birthday celebration to unprecedented lengths! WooHoo! Thank you Janette for my pressie from Sydney!

Then my DH came home and reported that the locusts had descended upon the leftover goodies with typical avidity. They stood around the little lemon cupcakes and scarfed them down in handfulls. They carried off the chocolate cupcakes with bestially proprietary growls and snarls to devour them - each in his own crumby corner. Cupcake papers began appearing in odd places around the shop. The chocolate chip brownies were snatched away in a time warp by a golden charriot of the gods. Their empty box appeared in the lunch room shortly before second break. My DH warned me that I should run all the boxes through the dishwasher, since the locusts licked them clean. Makes me proud to be a baker.