During one of my many recent electronic rambles, I came across a site called Learn Something Every Day, which excited me because I personally view a daily learning experience as an excellent idea and a wonderful life strategy. It was an experience I hadn’t embraced as often as I could have, perhaps, but every day is a new day and maybe it was time to take the leap.
 
 At the Learn Something Every Day website, I discovered that it used to be legal to send children through the mail. The t-shirt I learned this from was a little lacking in details, so that was disappointing, but still. Then I learned there are bears capable of smelling dead bodies even miles away, and something about how many sheets of paper can be sliced off of one tree, and that was about it. It turns out, the Learn Something team established its website in an effort to, mostly, sell t-shirts and fact books, and they weren’t about to toss out gads of knowledge without a check in hand. After all, the site wasn’t called Learn Something Every Day For Free now, was it?
 
You want to know what else I’ve learned recently? Over at Babelcube, I discovered that one of our translators was nearly nine months overdue on her assignment. Which is possibly an indication that Glynn and I haven’t been watching our Babelcube account as closely as we should have. Feeling that I’d been amiss, I wrote to the translator, she didn't feel inclined to respond, and I took her inaction as a clue that the project might not be racing forward as contractually promised. When I reached out to the Babelcubians to see what I should do next, Maria at BC killed the contract within a few hours. So, if you’ve always wanted to do a Spanish translation of an end-of-the-world/perfume industry/multiple boyfriends oriented-story, boy, do I have a job for you.
 
Finished with the Babelcube challenge, I returned to my quest for free daily knowledge. Over at Zidbits, they have things to sell, too, but they’re willing to provide some in-depth info if you happen to stop by. Zidbits is where I learned that diamonds DO last forever despite Glynn’s claim that “they look like glass”, “nobody really wants them anymore”, and I should replace my missing stone with the slightly-cracked piece of peridot that he found at an estate sale.
  
Back at Babelcube, one of our other translators, working in a different language, DID manage to finish his work on one of our novellas. Stefano did a sterling job of it, too, so eccellente!  I was surprised when he told me that our story was the first self-published novella he'd translated that didn't have at least one typo in it. Shortly after he wrapped up the translation, one of our new readers contacted us to say she really enjoyed our new novella and, here’s the kicker, the editing on the story, as well. She said she rarely found a well-edited story that was self-published.
 
Hearing their comments made me both happy and sad. Happy because, yay!, we did a good job and sad because, holy cheese and crackers, self-pubbed writers need to make certain their work is well-edited and relatively free of typos, don't you think? It isn’t easy, I get that, but it needs to be part of the job. If enough readers get burned by bad work, they’re going to give up on anything that’s self-published. That would make me very, very sad.
  
(The editing and typo stuff? None of it applies to writing this blog. I don't worry about my words when it comes to writing in space because, let’s be honest, it’s a blog. We're all friends here and, if you stopped by today, hoping someone had polished and washed these words, you're in for a touch of disappointment. When it comes to this place, you'd best expect a tpyo or tow.)
 
Stirred by what our latest reader has said, I fuss over things with Glynn, telling him what he already knows. I tell him that self-published work needs to be on a par with anything put out by Fireside Books -- and why, you wonder, Fireside Books? They gave Paris Hilton a six figure advance for Confessions of an Heiress, without any evidence that the woman could write at all. This itches at me but, still and all, I'll bet the book is well-edited and typo-free; if you'd like to check for yourself, you can pick up a "Like New" copy from Amazon for a penny + shipping – and, when I was done ranting, Glynn said, "Chuck Wendig says self-publishing is a shit volcano", which is not really something I wanted to hear.
 
But having heard it, I had little choice but to go over to Wendig's blog to read his lengthy, mildly profane and accurate post on author-publishers. Then I got depressed all over again when I realized his post was written a couple of years ago, and I realized things have only gotten worse.
 
And, as total aside, I started to wonder if the words shit volcano were really a thing or a Chuck Wendig creation? When I check the Urban Dictionary, I discover the term doesn’t belong to Chuck, it’s in somewhat frequent use and has a definition that everyone but me seems to know.  (There are youtube videos with the same name. I’m not providing any links.) So now I’m feeling out of touch and anal retentive but that’s probably because I am out of touch and anal retentive.
 
Glynn tells me he wouldn’t have me any other way. He mistakenly thinks I’ll view this as a compliment.

A prime example? This image on the left.
 
Maybe I’d better add a little backstory to this. You see, outside of our writing life, Glynn and I have our own personal email accounts – I doubt we’re alone in the use of multiple email accounts…and, now, thinking about this, I’ve gotten distracted. I wonder exactly how many email accounts we do have.
 
There’s our primary email address (it’s HiAnneGlynn via the gmail system, if you care to reach out and contact us); a secondary email address we use for our second pen name (and, although that name hasn’t published anything for the last couple of years, we still respond to a few emails every week); a third email address for our third pen name (nobody writes that guy); a FOURTH email address, established for still another pen name until we decided that three pseudonyms was, really, enough for now; my just Anne account, linked to my efforts in the artwork world, and my friends in the oils and acrylic biz; a just Glynn account, used mostly so he can scratch his collector’s itch, his sports itch, his...well, he's itchy; a joint family email address, so the Moms will know where to reach both of us at the same time, especially since neither Mom can ever remember even one of our pen names; and a spam email address, used for those times when a site demands an electronic mailbox or they won’t let you proceed to doing whatever it is you truly want.
 
Eight email addresses for two people. That seems like a lot and, when I’m struggling to remember which password went to which account, it seems like way too many. Now curious to see if I’ve overindulged in inboxes, I'm going to take a moment to investigate this. I'll be back.
 
​And now I am. In a very short time, I've found that Yahoo Mail is okay with eight email addys (at Yahoo, each person is allowed 10 addresses) and the gmail folks think we’re pikers (they encourage people to have as many accounts as they’d like). Apartmenttherapy.com suggests people have either two or four sites each -- they said two, initially, then changed their mind -- so, to my mind, we’re doing okay. I mean, I might doubt myself but how can I doubt Apartmenttherapy.com?
 
Even though I’d never been to Apartmenttherapy.com until this morning, and have no idea if they promote Evil or are a force for Good.
 
Do you want to know which of our email accounts gets the most action? The spam address, of course. It fills up daily. It’s a good thing that Team Google offers a fairly limitless space on their gmails, or Kohls and World Market would have maxed us out, big time. If Apartmenttherapy.com had demanded a contact address, you can guess which one I’d have given them.
 
But here’s the thing. One day in the not so distant past, Team Google decided that people should be allowed to pin an image to the emails they sent. Glynn thought this sounded like fun, went to HiAnneGlynn, and popped in a cover from one of our early stories. It’s mostly a picture of my legs, and they are perfectly adequate legs, but who in their right mind sends emails to people and includes a shot of their legs? I guess, maybe if we were selling nylons or hooker heels (since my feet were also in the picture and squeezed into the heels in question) but, other than that, it’s just wrong. We had a discussion, it went nowhere, and I tried not to use that email address for a bit. Once a few days passed and Glynn got distracted by some shiny object, I changed the picture to the one that used to sit in the upper right-hand corner of this website: Me, in a cowgirl hat.
 
Meanwhile, my honey decided to add his own photo to the “just Glynn” account. He picked a nice shot, one where he was sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon, looking into the sun as the wind blew in his hair. When I first saw it, I told him it was a good pic but I felt he needed to use one of his older ones. I thought he should go with the one that was taken when he lost a bet and had to spend an hour walking around a beach, blushing, while wearing the teeniest Speedo swimsuit ever made. (Black. So tight he could barely breath.) (Don’t feel sorry for him. If I’d been the one to lose the bet, you should have seen what he expected me to wear.)
 
“If you want, you can crop the photo and just show your legs,” I told him. He didn’t go for it.
 
A few days ago, he must have tired of a regular Glynn photo because he decided to replace it with the close-up of the Mad Monkey that you see here. This battery-operated beastie is at least fifty years old, coming into our possession when I suddenly decided I needed one for a painting. Daishin C.K. sold him and his identical brothers as “Musical Jolly Chimp” for many years. They used this name, I presume, because their marketing team thought that the more truthful title of “Screeching Death Monkey” would have affected sales negatively. The first time I pressed the toy’s head, it banged its cymbals, barred its teeth and gave a terrible death cry that actually shocked me. Yes, I laughed after, but I’m telling you, that toy does not share a room with me late at night.
 
In the outside world, you can find the mechanical monster without looking too hard. It’s on the cover of one of Stephen King’s books, and it’s featured in one of his stories; it’s seen in music videos; it’s seen in horror films, t.v. shows, on posters, and…well, check Wikipedia for “cymbal-banging monkey toy” and they’ll give you the complete rundown. It’s usually used as a symbol of fear. It’s mostly, and rightly, seen as something that scares people.
 
Yet this is what my man decides to use on his gmail account. I tell you, from here on out, I do the marketing for our work.

Last week, before everything went rocky and my life became a repetitive game of crossing the desert and counting cacti, I spent a few hours cruising eBay. When Glynn is on the site, he surfs here and there in a somewhat random way, but I prefer to focus my attentions. Most often, I look for all things Barbie. Last week, I realized I needed a Barbie Dream House. Not immediately, perhaps, but in my near future.

I found so many possibilities, I was amazed. There are people out there who have the very first Dream House, as incredible as that sounds, and they are willing to cut a deal for an interested buyer. Dear friends, I am that buyer.

Here’s the thing: when she was just starting out, Barbie's Dream House wasn't so dreamy. From the outside, the structure kind of looked like a storage unit -- Babs was at the cutting edge of the Tiny House Movement, but does anyone give her credit? -- and the inside of the rectangle was a bit modest, too. In 2014, the Daily Mail ran an article about it. They said Barb originally owned "a tiny yellow-walled apartment decked out with minimalist furnishings and crafted from cardboard; and it may not have been flash, but it certainly was practical" and they couldn’t have been more correct. If I’d been gifted with one as a child, I'd have destroyed it.
 
From love, not on purpose. Even as a child, I delighted in Barbie and her accessories. But when I played, I played hard and everything ended up suffering from my eagerness. Nothing I owned in those days has survived intact.
 
Glynn says he loves my eagerness. He's lucky I haven't destroyed him.

Naturally, once I found the absolutely most perfect 1962 Barbie Dream House, complete with EVERYTHING, all of it intact, all of it in nearly perfect condition, I couldn’t wait to show my sweetie.

“And it’s Buy-It-Now for $299,” I told him this because, honestly, I’d love to own this nearly miraculous toy and wouldn’t have minded skipping a few of life’s so-called “necessities” if it helped advance the cause. I mean, our food budget could use a little trimming, anyway, and Glynn has told me he wants to lose a few pounds, so why shouldn’t we start now?

“Three hundred bucks for an old doll house?” Glynn responded. “That’s crazy.”

“Not for this doll house. All of the cardboard furniture is intact. It’s sixty years old and it looks new!”

 “How can we use that money to buy a Barbie trailer box when we could use the same cash to grab an authentic masterpiece that would enrich our lives for years to come?” he asked.

“Explain.”

“I can get a Van Gogh for that amount of money,” he said. “Or a Monet. But I've always liked Van Gogh.”

I happen to think a 60-year+ marvel of Mattel engineering is an authentic masterpiece, if you want my opinion, but Glynn wasn’t haven’t any of it that day. When I told him I didn’t want a John Van Gogh or a Martin Monet, he told me he was talking about original paintings by the famous artists themselves.

When I mentioned that was crazy, he suggested I do a little looking on eBay. I don’t know why, but I was surprised to learn he was correct. There are all kinds of people selling original Vincent Van Gogh artwork on eBay, usually at a starting price that runs less than the price of Barbie’s dream cottage. As Ripley once said, believe it or not.

One seller offered a canvas with “real hanmade paint!” (his spelling), and assured buyers that he would consider any suitable offers. Considering the rarity of real hanmade paint, you probably want to jump on that one if it’s still around. Another eBayer put up an original drawing, also signed by Van Gogh, that he picked up at an estate sale. (My limited research revealed that authentic Van Goghs litter estate sales, garage sales, and flea markets. Keep your eyes open.)  The seller offered it without reserve since the artwork came without documentation. But if you DID want some paperwork to satisfy your estate lawyer, a third seller offered an eye-catching, signed painting and all of this for $275:  A registration certificate at the National Fine Arts Registry, transfer of the registration details to the new owner, a certificate of authenticity, and full transfer of ownership.

When I was done looking, I wasn’t tempted in the least…but Glynn kind of was. Once the “no reserve” original Van Gogh drawing topped $45, his interest faded. “Not worth it,” he declared.

I agreed with him.

But that Barbie Dream House? An absolute steal.
 

So where were YOU yesterday?
 
If you were doing a little website hopping, you may have noticed that I missed my weekly chat. It wasn’t on purpose. Things have been crazy around here for the last week – a family emergency, Mom in the hospital, two too long trips through a too long desert – but I still intended to post on Thursday.
 
If you must know, I was going to talk about several surprisingly affordable Van Goghs and an almost miraculous Barbie Dream House that I discovered online. I mean, the Barbie hangout is AMAZING. If you personally aren’t into Barbie or Vincent, you might not have found it my most scintillating post, but it wouldn’t have been so run-of-the-mill, either. (According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the phrase run-of-the-mill originated at the turn of the Twentieth Century and was “in reference to material yielded by a mill before sorting for quality. And, no, until today, I didn’t know there was an online etymology dictionary, either. Now that we both know, we’ll probably be using it all of the time.)
 
Having traveled through the too long desert to stay at a family member’s house, I wished I had more to do between doctor visits and trips to have blood drawn. (Not my doctor; not my blood. I was the support system.) I could have brought my laptop, but I'd decided to take a writing pad on this journey, instead. A pen-and-paper writing pad, like writers used in the old days.
 
I did this for two reasons: (1) I didn’t realize my three day visit was going to last a week; and (2) I’d recently read Margaret Atwood’s rules for writers, and thought it might be fun to go old school. About Day Two, I realized there's a reason why writers of my generation have abandoned the old school. I was already tired of writing with paper and pencil. By Day Three, I was done with paper and pen, too. I wanted my laptop. I wanted my Microsoft Word. But, still, my gracious family member DID have a rarely-used computer that they were willing to share, so I could still do the AnneGlynn.com thing.
 
I kicked up their somewhat ancient computer and wiggled my fingers in anticipation of the post to come. Then the computer went boom. Not literally, of course. I’ve yet to see a computer truly explode, although they occasionally do in bad movies. In real life, they just don’t boot up or they go black or they suddenly quit. The end result is usually the same: your heart falls, you curse a little, and you call the Geek Squad.
 
“Oh, did the computer quit again?” my beloved family member inquired, looking over my shoulder. It turns out, the machine really hadn’t functioned properly for some time. Since the family almost never used it, she had vaguely hoped it would follow the advice offered in Luke 4:23 and heal itself.
 
The end result ended up being, no blog yesterday and no discussion of bargain basement Van Goghs or super expensive Dream Houses today. The really good news is that all is well. The emergencies have been resolved, Mom is home again, and everyone is happy. Me, too.
 
I staggered into the house early this morning, road-worn and weary, so I’ll see you next week. Unless my computer goes boom.