Need to Get Out More

One of the things about being a writer is that, IMHO, one needs to get out into the world and see and feel what's going on out there, be a bit engaged with the world as it is, the good, the bad and the ugly, even the commercial. That's why I feel a bit guilty about not watching much TV, or knowing the latest rock stars (are there still rock stars?) Unless you are writing historical, it seems like you as a writer need to be out there on the edge, observing and feeling and taking notes.

None of that was on my mind when I started looking for a kind of jacket online today during a lull at work. We're travelling to Paris and Berlin in late fall, and I'm already thinking travel wardrobe thoughts. The thing is, in Europe as in NYC, I don't like to be the country cousin. It's nicer to be a little bit au courant and on the cusp of things, age appropriate, season appropriate, and all that rubbish. So a new jacket is in order. Something for late fall, not hideous New England winter. Something to go with some decent wardrobe stuff already hanging in the closet. In other words, let's not get carried away here.

So there I was, googling, rejecting this, considering that, when I hit Nordstrom's web site, and all of a sudden, there were suitable jackets galore and they were all on sale! I mentally postponed the night's schedule, which included finally finishing the big put-together-into-one-ungainly-document of Promiscuous Mode, and nothing would do but to cruise down to the mall in Providence and strafe thru Nordstrom's for those jackets.

Significant other had noticed some cool shoes on sale at Nordstrom's in today's paper and was gung ho to shop, so off we went, with the idea of a cheap dinner at the mall and a quick shop.

I am not a Shopper with a capital 'S', but I have been shopping thrice this summer. That may not sound like a lot to some of you, but it seemed like plenty to me.

What I observed at the mall: my sneakers are all about 4 years out of date and weigh 4 times as much as any current sneaker. Put on to do list. Shop for new sneakers that don't weigh 5 pounds each.

Kid in hip hop clothing (looked like basketball uniform). Can someone tell me why masculine atheletes wear what looks to be skirts while playing ball with what looks to be a panty girdle underneath? Same kid purchasing sneakers at Nordstroms. Significant other looking askance. I am browsing through shirts in the young men's department. Realize some of this stuff is for men younger than my kids. Feel like old grandma. Handsome young mixed race kid that looks about 20 pulls out a roll of 5o dollar bills and buys three pair of sneakers. S.O. still completing sale. When he finally finishes, I say ,"we have to get out more." He agrees. Aging hippie type with very long hair looking at shoes. The world here seems very different that at work and at home and in the supermarket.

In the ladies jackets, I don't see anything like what I saw on the web site, and can't even find anything to try on. Very accomodating sales clerk shows me catalog, but I still can't find the web stuff. Decide to order on the web and return if it doesn't fit or I don't like. Found 2 cool t-shirts in the teeny-bopper section and bought them anyhow.

Can't find Fire and Ice, can't get into the Cheesecake Factory. I am in diet mode this week and tell S.O., "I can't eat any cheesecake and if I can't eat it you can't either." He nods. Moot point.
Can't find Joe's Bar and Grill, so we end up in fancy restaurant and blow a hundred bucks. So much for cheap eats. I order the vegetarian plate, and it is muy delicious and surely very healthy, but it tastes too good to be diet, and the scale will not have gone down in the morning. Maaybe we don't have to get out more. The two cans of tuna are still on the kitchen counter waiting for dinner. Tomorrow is another day.

Aloha,

Grapeshot

Ethelred the Unready

My novel, Promiscuous Mode is in scenes (ordered numerically to be sure) in a Word folder. There are 73 scenes (plus recipes) that need to be put into a master document. I put off doing this because a) it is a pain and b) I knew if I didn't have it done, someone would request the whole manuscipt.
Sure enough, an agent requested the whole shebang. The first 100 pages had been put together when those pages were edited, but the rest, yuck. First of all, I have to go thru each chapter and get rid of 80 per cent of the "justs." "Just" is a word I appear to be fixated on in my writing. The editor noticed this. The word count will probably go down by 1000 just by (oops!) eliminating 'just.' Just a darn minute.

So Ethelred the Unready is me. That name comes from a funny parody of history, 1066 and All That. If you don't know that 1066 was the Battle of Hastings, the book probably won't be that hilarious.

In my new book, Festival Madness, I am having a delightful time writing about Burning Man, which I will miss this year. It's a fantastic place to set a novel. Can't imagine why I didn't think of it sooner. Or why everyone else didn't also. If you don't know what Burning Man is, visit www.burningman.com. It will give you an idea. The event itself is beyond description. Well, I'm writing about it, so maybe not completely beyond.

Aloha,

Grapeshot

True Confessions

O.K., I admit it. I'm Oliva Out-of-it. I finally had to look up who Jessica Simpson is. Somehow I had confused her with the cartoon Simpsons. I do know who Britney Spears is and that she's pregnant. Of course, one would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know. Paris Hilton and her best friend are not speaking. I haven't seen the TV show in questions, but I'm sure it's inanely cute. Or maybe inane. I did watch the very first Survivor. Watched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Got a little tedious after a while with the wife or girlfriend coming in and screaming "oh my god" for five straight (or gay) minutes. Oh my god!

These eyes have never seen that music whatchamacallit- American Idol. Hey, I haven't even seen the West Wing. Sopranos, yes, Sex in the City, yes, Deadwood, no! Six Feet Under I came to late and had no clue. The Wire, no, although it sounds pretty good.

I never watched Friends.

If you write and work and cook and have a modest social life and family life and garden and these things, then it is very hard to watch TV. I did see a bit of the Tour de France and sometimes I'll tune in to an inning or so of the Red Sox. I like Mystery at nine on Sunday. Most of the time. TV is a habit, and I ain't addicted.

The other thing is that I'm not crazy about movies with lots of explosions and special effects, so we tend to see foreign films and "little" movies, like Sideways.

I am not the kind of person who ooohs and aaahs about Las Vegas. South Beach is all right in small doses. Key West! Now there's a cool spot. Puerto Rico, ditto. You will never see me disbarking from a cruise ship with guys in muscle shirts and black socks.

I am not philosophically against sleaze, but I like to pick and choose my sleaze. So personal, yes? In the old (very old) days, Nantucket had a nice little backwater feeling, just this size of sleaze. Old and sleepy and a bit rundown. God, I would take that any day to the new Nantucket of the robber barons and the mega-mansions.

So it goes.

Aloha,

Grapeshot

Dilbert lives

"The word is that if we can't do it, they'll find someone who will." The latest project at work, a trilogy of software testing and installation that doesn't have a prayer. Phase I is almost complete and will go in on schedule. Phase II is iffier but is also achievable.

Phase III is the killer. This is an application developed by two third parties, with the input from our upper management, who wanted functionality that would be all things to all people. The problem is that we are the alpha site and the stuff is just bound to be buggy. It is supposed to be up and working early October. We're already divided Phase III into phases in a desperate attempt to get the main part done. The software has been sitting untested by us due to the development of a new web site that became so bug-ridden and complex that it took a year to get things working.

The hubris that decides what can and cannot be done by an arbitrary date lost one company I worked for forty million dollars.

Our team has a fantastic history of successful projects, and that the web site ever came up at all was a testimony to work and determination and attention to detail that went way beyond the call of duty. I don't know how much it cost (lots) but it replaced a web site that worked really well, but was lacking in a few functions that could easily have been added. Now it has been replaced by a behemoth where nothing is intuitive and the customers are frustrated. Go figure.

So will we be replaced by "someone who can?" Dunno. Are the threats idle? Probably. Why would you boot a team who understands the business and the technology with the clueless? Why would you want to? Unless, of course, you are clueless. Welcome to Dilbert's World.

Duh!

Grapeshot

A Berkshires Idyll

Last weekend we tooled out to the Berkshires, always a delightful summer destination. I had an apricot pandowdy along and a chicken salad with mango and grapes in a curry mayonnaise. Also "lite" Kielbasa from the smoker.

Friday night, after a brief but intense downpour, we took in the Gray Fox Bluegrass Festival. Really cool music on a beautiful summer evening, because the rain took the heat out of the air leaving only softness. Cresent moon rose over the trees and the musicians played their guitars and mandolins and fiddles and a beautiful woman with a bare midriff danced to the music while twirling a hula hoop. She looked like a professional dancer with strong arms and back and a long, lean torso. We decimated the pandowdy and a couple bottles of wine, and made a large dent in the Kielbasa. Yum. The music got better and better. Gotta dance!

Saturday morning we stopped in Great Barrington at a bagel place and drove on up to Tanglewood for the 10:30 rehearsal. It was the modern music program. Sometimes it's hard to tell when the orchestra has stopped tuning up and started playing. We listened to Harbison, Wuorinen, Varese and Gershwin's American in Paris. The Gershwin number sounded fantastic. I'd never heard it live. The Symphony did a great job. James Levine sits on his stool and doesn't expand too many calories but he still gets a heap of music out of the orchestra. The Harbison number had the advantage of brevity. Not so the Wuorinen, which was long, and Peter Serkin's piano magic and the composer's prescence still couldn't save the tedium of the piece. Those in the know say that if you have ever actually played this modern stuff, you come to appreciate it, so maybe I should dust off the squeaky clarinet from high school and tootle away. The Varese Ameriques was better, and sounded like an NYC at rush hour, only musically, and I liked it a lot.

Came back to our hosts, ate the rest of the chicken and other salads, and took a huge long nap. Sat in the hot tub to wake up and enjoyed a grilled salmon dinner with roasted potatoes and salad. Hint to you cooks: Annie's Goddess Dressing is pretty tasty and doesn't have yucky chemicals therein.

Finished up the evening with good conversation.

After breakfast we visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. Lots of New Yorker covers on display. Neat display of weathervanes, apparently the result of a contest. Fun and whimsical and creative and they even functioned!

Late lunch at the Red Lion and back onto the Pike.

Summer in New England can't be beat.

Depressing Statistics

World of Mirrors: Foreign intrigue in the Baltic:
began queries 8/16/04: Rejections or query ignored to date: 39
Stupid-ass form letters: 31
No respone whatsoever: 4
Positive but fell thru or still waiting for "2nd response" : 4

100% impersonal form letter response: 79%

Promisuous Mode: Cozy with an edge in the American heartland
began queries 6/20/05
Queries to date: 8
Stupid-ass form letters: 3
Personal response : 2, one negative, one positive
Still waiting: 3

Cost of postage: about $60.00
Put downs and feelings of worthlessness: Priceless!

Driving By the Lake on a Sunny Morning

Summer mornings feel soft with promise. I love driving by the lake. My best writing ideas come from that short stretch of road. A rock shaped like a shark fin sticks out of the water. Two cormorants lounge companionably on a flat rock. This morning a man fished from an inflatable boat. I haven't figured it out yet, but people must have specific rights to tiny sections of the shore. some have tents or gazebos. One has a red flower garden: roses and geraniums with a tiny pergola. There are houses on one street that obviously began life as cottages. I read that big hotels once lined the shore. In winter the sun rises over the water and in fall the light on the leaves is breaktaking. Why does the beauty of this lake inspire me? Not to poetry or anything literary, but plot ideas, thoughts about my characters, things germane to the story. It's a mystery.

I like the funky cottages and further along there are two large spreads, one almost (but not quite) derelict, the other in the best of shape. The farm has cows again. Three of them grazing. I like that, too.

It's a calming drive before the workday begins with its insanity and its stupidity. I've been in IT too long now, jaded and cynical. Seen it all and liked not much. The technology, yes, liked that, always, and the co-workers, mostly, and even some of the management, but the rest, the mis-management, the idiotic decisions, the stupidity, the cupidity, and the hubris are hard to take after a while. Suck it up at work as well as marketing one's book(s). Life is a series of "suck it ups."

Onward,

Grapeshot

A Little White Lie Unravels

As noted earlier, I emailed a couple of agents whom I hadn't heard from after months and months asking if they had received my query. Both responded, and one said no, probably not, and the other said, maybe, we will look.

I am busy and sort of distractable, and my email to one of the agents mentioned the wrong book, the book that has already been published. The query was for the World of Mirrors. There was never any query to this agent for Shadow Warriors. . Guess what? She responded in the usual way, nicely, and even mentioned the Shadow Warriors title twice, so I at least knew there was a human at the other end, but the fact is, I sent no query for this book, so how can they turn it down? Very easily, thank you very much.

This is the sort of response that gives the so-called "beginning writer" night sweats, because it reinforces the idea that unless you have an 'in,' no one is really reading these queries. They either do or do not sit on a desk for days or weeks or months or come back in the return mail, but no one is seriously looking. They send the form letter back, and wish you the best.

The demon me, if I only had time, would send out queries for already published books, and synopses of Faulkner, Hemingway and Shakespeare and see what the hell came back. Probably the standard form letter. Wonder if anyone has actually done this. It begs to be tried.

But it won't help me get published, so in my single-minded push, I better look for agents who might read a letter. How to get noticed, without being a jerk. Does anyone out there know? Is there anyone out there? Sometimes I think of saying outrageous inappropriate things, because no one does seem to be out there. Shouting into the void, as it were. The mouse that roared. Now there's a plot. Hmmmm.

Sorrowfully,

Grapeshot

Chicken Pesto Salad with Tomatoes

The pesto sauce itself is from the ancient Time-Life series on food. It's an excellent pesto recipe. Bertucci's in Cambridge, MA, the original Bertucci's, used to make a chicken pesto, served as part of their antipasto. Rebecca's in Kendall Square served a salad with farfalle, tomatoes and chicken. My take is derivative, but delicious. Odd how the old original stuff is always best. If you can lay your hands on native or home grown tomatoes, the dish will be that much tastier. Bon appetit!


Chicken Pesto Salad with Tomatoes

1) Chicken: poach a large chicken breast in salted water with aromatic vegetables (celery, onion, carrot and parsley or cilantro) until tender. Cool. Remove chicken from bones and cut into bite sized pieces. Can be done ahead of time.

2) Make pesto: Ingredients list: 2 cups (packed) fresh basil leaves, stripped from stems, and coarsely chopped. 1 t. salt, ½ t. freshly ground black pepper, 2 t. chopped garlic, 1 to 1 ½ T. finely chopped pine nuts (preferred) or walnuts. ½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

Method: in a blender or food processor: combine basil, salt, pepper, garlic, nuts and 1 c. olive oil. Mix at high speed until ingredients are smooth. Stop and push herbs down with a rubber spatula if needed. The sauce should be thin enough to run off the spatula. If too thick, add more oil and blend. Transfer sauce to a bowl and stir in grated cheese. Can be done ahead of time.

Coat cooked chicken with pesto (you will not need more than ½ cup. Save remaining pesto for other uses. (Cover tightly so that it will not discolor).

3) Meanwhile, cook 1 pound of farfalle (bow tie pasta) in salted water following package directions. Drain and rinse with cold water.

4) Cover 2-3 large firm vine-ripened (home grown are best) tomatoes with boiling water. Drain, run cold water over tomatoes and slip the skin off the tomatoes. Cut tomatoes into wedges.

Assembly: In a large attractive serving bowl, combine chicken pesto, and pasta. Toss and dress with a bit more pesto if necessary. Taste for seasoning. Chill. Before serving, add tomatoes and toss lightly one more time.

Garnish with fresh basil leaves.

Weekend Menu

One of the best things about summer is grilling and a more relaxed lifestyle. And seeing friends. We're having a small dinner party this weekend, utilizing both the new smoker and the old grill. Should be fun. Cooking is immediately gratifying, unlike writing. You cook it, you serve it, they eat up, and the compliments flow.

The garden is at its most beautiful. The hurricane is sending rain our way, but with the watering ban and the dry earth, I won't bitch and moan.



July 9th Menu


Smoked Salmon
Mushroom Crostini

Asian Carrot Soup

Grilled Turkey with Barbeque Sauce and
Watermelon Relish

Potato and Pea Salad with Chive Aôli
French Bread

Berry and Farmer’s Cheese Tart

Miscellany

Last night I stared at the spread sheet with all my queries. Five queries about the East German book, World of Mirrors, went back to December-January, still unanswered. Folks, December was a long time ago. I googled around and found the e-mail addresses of three of the agents and wrote polite inquiries asking what happened? One of them actually replied today. Apologetically. Some of the biggest names in the literary agent world are also the nicest.

Did I ever mention the really rude one in Ohio who said he would look at my book? I sent the whole manuscript AND a prepaid postage sticker with $10.00+ on it for the return of the manuscript. Months and months went by. I wrote and e-mailed. No answer. Finally I wrote and asked for my postage to be returned. He answered rudely and did not return the postage. Later, I found his name with unflattering comments on the Preditors and Editors page. He never looked at the book. Probably used my postage for something else. A scumbag, par excellence.

Another agent that I met at a mysery conference said to said him the whole manuscript of Promiscuous Mode. I did, 26 months ago. No reply. Didn't take phone calls, didn't answer e-mails. I always send a SASE. At the very least these people could send out the AHFL. Hint. FL stands for Form Letter.

My new book, Festival Madness, starts to look like a real manuscript with almost 100 pages. It's fun to write about Burning Man, which I will miss terribly over Labor Day, but instead I am off to Bouchercon in Chicago to network with other writers and try to get another toe in the door. I've even been assigned to a panel. But I won't be on the Black Rock Desert, and that will be hard.

Suck it up. As usual.

Grapeshot.

Thanks you very much for your query

Unfortunately your project is not one that we think would be right for our agency. Blah blah blah. Blah blah bloody blah.

Sincerely,
Name might have actually been signed by a real person at
Ye olde literary agency

Suck it up! All day every day.

World's 2nd best query tanks again.

What a Writer Does Besides Write

Sure, there's the usual brush-your-teeth, go-to-the-supermarket kind of stuff we all do. There's the actual writing, and I am feeling pretty smug about having done about 10 pages over the long weekend. I also got an entry ready for a contest and sent off the CD (used my new CD burner) with a letter, a bio, a check and an SASE. I had never put the book World of Mirrors, into one document. Messed around a little with master and sub-documents in Word, an arcane topic to be sure, and decided to just wham everything together in one long doc. Seemed to work. This is the novel, my East German book, that now has about 40 rejections, if you count no response as a rejection, and I sure as hell do.

Got going on another contest for the Wisconsin book, Promiscuous Mode. The contest is in England and this is a very American book, so I really have no hope but they seem like nice people which is something I haven't run across much in the publishing industry of late. So contests and competitions are writerly activities where the only writing is a cover letter.

Yesterday, I came to the computer determined to write the scene I've been futzing around with for a long time. Now where did I put that crucial document that tells me all about the airport? Paw thru a file drawer crammed with paper and my big "in" box that will hold half of Cincinatti. Time to organize the research. I take all of the research for the German book out of the hanging folder and schlep it into a file drawer in the store room. Probably I could put it out with the trash, but since the book has no agent and hasn't been sold, it seems wise to keep all the research for a little while longer, should the need to do revision rear its ugly head. Then I dig the manilla folders out of the crowded file and give the new book, Festival Madness, its own hanging file with spiffy new bold labels. A casual visitor to the office would wonder, because the folders are labeled "meth house," "transsexuals," "Airport and Flying," "Reno and Burning Man," and so on.

I end up doing a lot of research no matter where the book is set or how much I think I know about what's going to happen. That's why I am doing all sorts of aviation research of things I know less than nothing about. And transexuals. And meth houses. I've been collecting clippings about meth houses for years. Not sure if the meth house belongs in this book. Screw 120,000 words, let's do 85 or 90k. Much more manageable. I have almost 25,000 words which is a really good start. The novel is by turns funny and dramatic. Dramedy is the Hollywood word for such a concoction. Dramedy, I like that.

So I found my airport research and wrote the scene and the one after that and I'm just about ready to hook of some last pieces and then move forward again. have to finish the sex scene next. That stopped me for a while, because I didn't really know the male character well enough. Now I think I do. Writing is weird. Half the time you're not even writing. You're driving by the lake asking yourself, "what is Jean Claude really like?" He only exists in your head and the words on the page.

Maybe, just maybe, the world's second best query letter will have more responses this week. In the meantime,

Aloha,


Grapeshot

Five friends at kindergarden graduation in San Francisco  

What a Difference a Day Makes

In my Friday post I saw almost all the people in downtown Boston as ugly. Yesterday evening, Saturday, on a whim, we took the subway into town to catch the Middlesex County Fife and Drum Corps concert. The venue was in front of the "Old City Hall" in a leafy courtyard. The stone building, old, but not ancient has pleasing proportions and is just around the corner from the Freedom Trail. After a cold drippy spring and a hotter-than-blazes summer, the weather gave us its glorious best for the long 4th of July weekend. A lovely New England evening. Because this is Boston, a multi-ethnic crowd. Atop the building, Old Glory snapping in a breeze off the harbor. The concert started with a solitary bagpiper, then the fifes and drums came marching in. What a great performance! They capped it off with Yankee Doodle Dandy like I've never heard it performed. And we were literally sitting in the cradle of liberty.

Afterward, we walked yesterday's route past the new City Hall and down into the Fanieul Hall Market. Big crowds. In the spirit of the weekend, which started at Thursday's employee appreciation day, I ordered a jumbo hotdot with chili for dinner at the food court.

A big seismic shift since yesterday. No white shoes. Nobody eating pizza. Pleasant looking, even attractive people. Everyone. Significant Other remarked on it before I could say anything. Now I have to admit that Friday I had a very bad experience which may have colored the rest of the day, but could it have made the whole world ugly? Did I feel that alienated? Who knows?

After dinner, we did some serious people watching. I realized we had shared tables in the food court with Hispanics, Asians and Portugese. WASPS, we were a minority. I am o.k. with this, because I have always felt like an outsider and so nothing has really changed. Belonging is a state of mind. Besides, if you don't belong anywhere, you belong everywhere. Or that is how I feel.

So everyone was having a good time in the city last night. We watched some black kids break-dancing before a crowd right in front of Fanieul Hall. They were pretty cool. I had never actually seen break dancing "live."

Ccelebrate the 4th. See a parade. Hear a concert. Watch the fireworks. If you're not too old for it, do a little break dancing.

Aloha,

Grapeshot

Gerlach Garden in spring with old fashioned iris

I am trying the feature to post picture directly from the blog. Second time was a charm. We own this little lot with a mobil home and a nice garden at the end of the road. The end of the road is seductive whether it's the Baja, Key West or the Black Rock Desert.

Aloha

Grapeshot

The City

Significant other and I boarded the train bound for Boston, but certainly not for glory today. What can I say? The city is not the 'burbs. We climbed out of the Park Street station and took off for city hall. If the hot sticky temperature wasn't a clue, the sight of a gazillion tourists was the first indication of summer. The people of the great white shoe. Why do the tourists all wear big white sneakers? The young girls mostly wear flip-flops, but everyone else dons these immense leather monsters. God, they are ugly. And speaking of ugly, except for children, most people are pretty homely, too. We were cruising by City Hall Plaza and down into Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and I have to tell you that most of the people were ugly as hell, badly dressed and eating pizza at Faneuil Hall when a stroll thru the food court present a gazillion different cuisines to try. Bah humbug. A subsequent post will indicate why I am in such a deep dark bad mood. But the little kids were all cute. They chased the pigeons and it's all right if they eat pizza. I am really tired of seeing so many grown men gobbling pizza all the time. Maybe they are worried about their prostates. What the hell? I don't know.

With brow furrowed,

Grapeshot

The Company Picnic

My company's summer outing, dubbed Employee Appreciation Day was yesterday. Unlike last year, we were not forced to return to the office at 3:00 p.m. until day's end. Unlike last year, the hamburgers were fresh, not having been cooked sometime in the morning for lunch. So there was the usual big feed under the tent, and some sports stuff for the guys, an ice cream truck, fried dough, and next to the fried dough wagon, the "Wellness tent." Cripes, I do not like the word wellness at all. At the Wellness Tent, they were checking cholesterol after the employees (always called associates) scarfed down hamburgers, hot dogs, greasy Italian sausage, potato chips and the aforementioned ice cream and fried dough. Go figure.

Some idiots had the temerity to talk and laugh while the president of the company was speaking, such an office ettiquette gaffe that you have to wonder if maybe they had spiked their own lemonade or something. He was not pleased.

I hope it's not giving too much away to say that the theme was baseball, this being Boston after all, and we were encouraged to wear baseball attire. In the mad scramble that is my leaving the house in the morning, I grabbed the baseball hat from the previous owners of the company who been the losers in a hostile take-over.

The president said many wonderful things about where the company was going, and the big plans for the future, but the one thing he didn't say was "thank you." Hey, it was employee appreciation day. So, I was glad I wore the "f*** you" baseball cap. It had a certain je ne sais quoi. And the fried bread, which I have not eaten in 15 years since we last went to the Topsfield Fair, sat heavy in my stomach. At 7:00 p.m., still bloated and nauseous, I took two antacids which hit the spot.

The highlight of the afternoon, besides the (urp, belch) fried bread, was the drawing. The confirmed batchelor won the Tupperwear look alike plastic goodies. I don't know if there was a left-over pizza crisper or not. Did not win the Red Sox tickets, did not win the IPOD. Did not pass go.

Aloha

Grapeshot