Wrote to Barbara yesterday and asked if they'll be willing to send back a few originals so I can rescan them for my greeting cards. She wrote back to say that she has to check with Lynne, who's out of the office until today or tomorrow. I don't remember who Lynne is, but I have her name and email address on the Llewellyn page of my address book, so I must have encountered her before.
(It's hard to tell, when hearing the name of someone at Llewellyn in connection to my project, whether I'll ever encounter them again. So I write down every name I come across, just in case. I thought we would have been passed on to an editor long ago, but Barbara has been our contact throughout the process. In fact she's the only person there that I've developed any kind of relationship with. Way back in the beginning, I did get to be friendly with a designer named Marilyn. I remember staying home from work during that huge winter storm in early 2000, sitting at my desk and watching more snow fall than I've ever seen in my life, writing a lengthy message to Marilyn full of enthusiasm and ideas for the book and box. I was so thrilled that a publisher actually wanted my deck, and Marilyn was nice enough to show personal interest in it, that I went a little overboard on her. But then Marilyn left the company soon after, and Barbara's been stuck with me ever since.)
In any case, whoever Lynne is, she must be the person who actually has possession of the originals, since she has to decide whether they're willing to send some back to me or not. To be honest, I'll be a little surprised if they do. Now that they've got everything, I wouldn't blame them for wanting to hang onto it. Still, I hope they're willing. I can't print my greeting cards without better scans of the originals. And who knows when I'll get the originals back once they've gone to Belgium. Maybe not until after the deck is all finished. Oh well, guess I should have researched this better last fall.
I still haven't gotten the hang of this Greymatter web journal software. It's pretty cool but it has some odd quirks. For instance, every entry in my archive is listed as being written on a Wednesday. Maybe that will make people think I'm writing regularly (ha ha). In brighter news, figured out how to add sound to my web site with zero load time added for people who don't want a noisy site.
We had Sean and Pam over for dinner and a game of mah jongg. I hadn't played mah jongg in a long long time (not since I'd last seen them, which was last year). About mid-way through the game Pam had a terrific hand, very impressive, which put her 12,000 points in the lead. Then right at the end, Sean put together the best hand I'd ever seen -- over 150,000 points total. It was amazing; I took a picture of the winning tiles to mark the occasion.
Seeing these two winning hands in one night pointed out, once again, one of the problems with our scoring method. We have a few hands called "maximum point hands" which are given an arbitrary score. But we don't limit other hands to that maximum score. So Pam, with a maximum point hand that really was spectacular, won less than a tenth of the points that Sean did. Sean's winning hand was better than Pam's, but not ten times better. Clearly the "maximum point" scoring needs to be re-evaluated.
(as is probably obvious, we play mah jongg for points, not money. I guess for a lot of people that would be as pointless as playing poker without money. But I can't handle the stress of gambling; it's no fun for me. Besides, the absence of risk allows you to play for skill, not just to win. And to appreciate someone else's brilliant game without taking a hammering yourself.)
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