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book celebration
Tuesday, June 26 2012
I went into town today to get some one by lumber for use in finishing the door opening and east window on the greenhouse upstairs. Also, because I keep needing to cut long narrow slots accurately, I finally bought a cheap table router.
Back at the house, after going nuts with a bottle of spray foam in the greenhouse upstairs, Gretchen and I went out to celebrate the release of the book she recently co-wrote (a less anonymous form of "ghost-wrote") with Jenny from Willow. We met up with Jenny and her husband Doug at New World Home Cooking, a place we'd basically stopped going to. But Jenny insisted that they have great new vegan options on their menu.
Our meal started out with Jenny and Gretchen excitedly rubbing their copies of their books together like the vulvas of excited lesbian schoolgirls. And then we all ordered drinks. I ordered a habañero-flavored martini, which ended up being a bit too warm. Also, as it turns out, hot pepper is not really very good in a vodka-based beverage.
Despite the excitement over the book (which has been shipped overnight by the publisher), there was a small dark cloud hanging over our festivities. It had taken Gretchen only minutes to discover a fairly serious error in this printing (10,000 copies had been produced). The chapters each begin with a small story about a rescued farm animal at Jenny's animal sanctuary and then jumps back to some point in Jenny's past. The moment of this jump was supposed to have been marked by a divider comprised of dingbats, but whoever had been responsible had, for most chapters, put the divider in the wrong place, making the reading experience even more jarring than if there had been no dingbats. Though the publisher and editor hadn't really had to get all that much right in the publication of the book, this was one of the things that they really should have gotten right. Perhaps this is a reflection on the present state of the publishing industry; if an author wants things done right, he or she must micromanage. Somehow I don't think it was always this way, at least for a major-label publisher (as is the case for this book).
The food tonight was very good, but it was also expensive. The guy who runs New World Home Cooking, though he indulges vegans, also passively-aggressively feels the need to gouge them. Vegan food draws on inherently less-expensive ingredients than non-vegan food, yet vegan entrees at New World Home Cooking tend to be three or four dollars more expensive. Maybe this makes some vegans feel special, but it just annoys Gretchen and me.
As we were getting ready to leave, we let our dogs run around the New World Home Cooking parking lot. Ramona and Eleanor kept returning to the vicinity of the dumpster, where they would bark. An employee on a cigarette break told us that they were probably barking at the bear who likes to hang out there.
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