Pen Pals

Today's accomplishments: I started and completed a seven-generation family history fan chart to display. {Wouldn't you know, I wrote it in ink, and messed up. More than once. Thereby continuing the unending tradition of making my home-made treasures look REALLY home-made.} The Fine-Young-Men-In-Training and I "played school" today, which was a lot of fun- -though not at all productive. I got three loads of laundry through the system. I spent an hour on family history, only to discover that the duplicate name I thought I was so conscientiously going to correct, is too large to fix. {"Newbies." [insert eye-rolling here.]}

{Today's motherly regret snafu* misstep: I fed my children Top Ramen for dinner (yes, really.) with canned carrots. Both a hit. The positive response was not sufficient to quell my feelings of guilt- -it most definitely made them worse.}

My two cents about pen pals:

A. I had a french pen pal in the ninth grade, and though it only began as a manditory "Beginning French" requirement, I never-the-less enjoyed getting mail that was post-marked all the way in France.

B. My brother's wife's brother {yup.} was my pen pal beginning just before ninth grade and ending somewhere during our senior year. He quoted lyrics from They Might Be Giants in the margins and Harry Connick Jr. in the text. What was there not to love about those letters?

C. I just finished reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society- -as mentioned previously- -a wonderfully fabulous fictional book of letters written by (sometimes reluctant, sometimes pious, sometimes whole-hearted) always entertaining pen pals. Delicious.

And now to finally come to my point. I met a very funny woman and fellow writier, while dispensing wine** at the wedding of the daughter of a friend last month. She was visiting from Canada, and we had a very easy and lively conversation about shrimp molds gone awry and writing fiction. So imagine my delight when I received an actual email after exchanging email addresses a month ago! And even though she was mistaken in the place of our meeting {I have never, in fact, been to the Ausberg Fortress music workshop in Seattle!} she had the right person. Whew.

Could it be? A new pen pal, and with the prospects of discussing music and writing no less?

Mais oui!

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*I didn't know that "snafu" was an acronymn for a military phrase containing profanity. Now I do. And so do you. You're welcome.
**I was merely filling in at the literal last minute when my friend (who didn't want alcohol to be served at the wedding in the first place thank-you-very-much) was left high and dry by the person who had agreed previously to serve the wine that the groom's family provided. I myself, never having had a drink of alcohol in my life, volunteered in order to spare my friend any further stress on that already overly stressful day. The groom's father (a genuine frenchman in the flesh!) had to show me how to use a cork screw and how to pour the right amount in the right way. I had a fabulous time meeting people, and trying something new, which may come in handy in my fiction one day, though rest assured will not come in handy in my personal life. Serendipity indeed that it lead to meeting a fellow authoress!