Fan mail

I can't help it - I just LOVE getting fan mail. 


Since today's a bit busy at the office getting caught back up after traveling last week, I thought I'd entertain you with some of the email adoration I've received over the past week.  I've spiced these notes up with a picture here and a tid-bit there, but the rest is the sole work of my incredibly immense - and might I add darn witty - fan base.  

(Never mind that the bulk of that fan base is composed of my grandparents.)


FIRST UP:
October 20th, 2011
From: Nana
To: Me (duh!)
Subject: bl og fun og

dear katherine,     


we received your lovely letter this morning. thank u 4 being so thoughtful to take the time to write on paper, stamp it and post. no one does it with all of the texting etc. and u know we r not techies so u write the old fashioned way 2 us.

The two of them (my Nana and Pops) on a family cruise in the Baltic Sea

your latest story is right on the $ with todd and liz and spending habits.

Liz and Todd, aka. Mom and Dad, the fashionista and the country bumpkin NASCAR racer

i wish i could b more like your mom but lifestyles and habits don't change much from early imprinting. stay in the middle of this economic dilemma!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! great writing katherine. 

Really - your lifestyle hasn't EVER changed, Nan?

If not, would love to see you break out that headband at Christmas.

(Julia and Julia)

(Nana and my aunt / godmother Julia)

p.s. i did return that pie pan (As referenced in this post) and drove off without sam, thinking he was in the car hiding.

My brother Sam in Zermatt this past spring - always the dare devil and prankster.  He loves to play a good trick.

when he called from the store for a pickup i still thought it was a joke and he was in the car calling. i then proceeded to drive around your neighborhood talking in the vehicle to sam whom i thought was in the back of the car hiding when in fact he was in the parking lot of a grocery store in a very bad part of town: Festival Food Market.

To Nana's credit, Sam, Gretters, and I had a history of playing this trick - we'd hide in the trunk and pretend like we weren't there.  Our parents and grandparents would play along chiming out a variety of playful questions: "Where could KK be?  Did we leave Sam back at the house?  Oh no, we must have forgotten the children."  We, meanwhile, would be giggling our booties off in the way back.

Never mind that the last time we had played this game was 5 years prior.

eventually he called your mother and she said please pick up sam at the store where u returned the 39 cent pie pan. alls well that ends well!


love and hugs 2 u my dear.
nan & pops

Despite the unfortunate incident at the Festival Foods, Sam and Nana remain best of buds bonding over their duel hatred for Vietnamese fish served whole.

NEXT UP:
October 22nd, 2011
From: Dickie Boy (as referenced in here)
To: Me (duh!)
Subject: your blog

KK
October the  22nd

        I am very impressed with your blog and am sorry to have passed over
it so quickly without interacting with you. Now there are so many
things about which I need to comment, that I hardly know where to
begin.

It's okay you didn't get to it until now Dickie Boy - I know you've got a lot more important things going on in your life right now: the Dogs. :)

Some weeks ago I did write an essay on my experience with that
wonderful Chevy SUV of your dad’s and tried to attach it as a comment
to your piece on your car; but given my competence with things
electronic, my thoroughly amusing essay vanished forthwith into the
ethernet, gone from my brain as well as from my hard drive. But I do
remember Todd asking me to help him drive that van home from Boca
Grande to Milwaukee without sharing with me the facts that he would be
doing all the driving, that there was no air conditioner and that the
temperature would not get below 90 degrees until we hit Indianapolis.
It was a long trip and a bad time but it did make a good story. Too
bad about my ineptitude with the computer.

 

 I would say the burb - despite its age - might have a leg up on some of your rides DB.

        While we’re on your dad  I enjoyed your description of him as a
spendthrift. I, like you, have long thought of  of him as a “thrifty
spender”, in fact there was a time when I would have considered him a
tightwad, but no more. In any case you will be interested in the Funk
and Wagnall take on spendthrift:

                        spendthrift |ˈspen(d)ˌθrift|
noun
a person who spends money in an extravagant, irresponsible way. 

      We both know that that is not Todd. Nonetheless, your reference to
his shopping technique of checking the price per unit coincided
exactly with my own experience of yesterday.  Judy sent me to the
store to buy toilet paper and I, thoroughly confused by the abundance
of package sizes and prices, finally reverted to the unit pricing
cards under each packaging family and found an unbelievable range of
prices. Having picked up, by reverse genetics, some sense of thrift, I
was able to bring home a great bargain at .0015 cents per sheet.Actually, like Todd I find myself checking those pricing cards often.
As you know, Todd has had a great influence on his family in all
directions.

 I think you have potential to become a thrify spender too DB! 

        But let me get back to your Blog. I like your writing a lot and am
amazed by your literary fecundity as well as your latter day Larry
David skills. Never have so few (you and Larry) made so much of so
little. Addressing the fecundity issue first I am amazed that you can
so quickly turn out such nicely finished material, replete with
beautiful photographs as well as fresh and interesting ideas. It is
hard for me to read as fast as you write. I would expect that you
would soon fall into the stifling embrace of writer’s block.

        Then we get to the Larry David thing. I can’t avoid the feeling that
Seinfeld had a big influence on your thinking process. You do such an
amazing job of making a small thing into a captivating read.

=         

1

I do think we do an amazingly similar thing with our lips whilst smiling - auspicious?  I think so.  Watch out HBO.  I'll be coming for you just as soon as I start going bald.

Recognizing that you are a teensie weenie bit brilliant in your

writing, I just can’t leave alone  the path by which you attained
these skills. The genetics are obvious, they didn’t come from your
father, who got a 250 on his English SATs. Thank the Lord that he
played football, without that skill of his  you would never have been
born. Anyway the literary gene came via your mother and back to me;
and it was’t just genetics, I had to intervene forcefully in her
learning process.
        When Liz was at USM and struggling with English, she came to me for
guidance on a book report with which she was struggling. I put her on
to one of my favorite books, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s  “The Sirens of
Titan”, which incorporated epic imagination and a host of literary
techniques, lending itself perfectly to a book report. Perhaps
Vonnegut was  still a little advanced for Liz; anyway she just could’t
get her arms around the essence of this novel so it fell to me to help
her write her paper, which I did,  almost to the exclusion of Liz from
the effort. Now I recognize that doing your child’s paper is not
necessarily good parenting but from that experience Liz learned a
lifelong lesson of self reliance, a quality that she has passed along
to you. She got a C on the paper. What was that teacher thinking?
        Well, thats about it for now. Keep up the good work and I will be an
assiduous reader and, as always, your fan.

Love     db

(Me, Sammers, DB, Gretters)

Well I hope that this post has made you chuckle and perhaps want to send your own bit of loving words my way.  :)

xoxo

KK