Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk

If you follow me on ye old twitter, or if you follow Tobias Buckell, you saw this…

Me (in RI) with my Arctic Rising copy signed by @tobiasbuckell courtesy of my sis (in OR)

And now the rest of the story that doesn’t fit into the tiny little box of twitter.

First of all, because this is driving me crazy, I didn’t flip the photo or anything like that. For some reason when I pressed the button on my phone to use the camera that faces me, it mirrored the shot. Dunno why. Only the third pic I’ve taken with the phone even though I’ve had it for a year. Also, at first I had this crazy face thing going on, and I didn’t want to look like I was going to murder the book.

So back in January I was reading his website and saw that his book tour was going to hit Beaverton Oregon on March 2. “But you live in Rhode Island and have never been farther west than Milwaukee” you say. And in response I say “How did you know I’ve  been to Wisconsin?” and once I get over that you know creepy amounts of my travel history (also, Milwaukee smells really bad) I tell you that my sister used to live there. It’s a suburb of Portland has she’s raved to my whole family about the epic bookstores that are out there. So BAM! I call her up and make this happen. I double up my copy of Crystal Rain with her birthday present (which was an awesome Hartford Whalers hat) and mail it all out across the country.

March 2 happens, as they do every year. And I went back to my twitter from that day so I can quote what I said and realized “Oh… I did a blog about this three weeks ago” and completely forgot about it. Well this version has a picture.

I’m gonna finish the rest of the story anyways!

So Sara and my brother in law, Sir Greg the Brave, hit up the book signing and because they’re awesome got me Arctic Rising. Since I had pontificated in the tiny box of twitter about how there was this multi state book signature thing going, when she got to the front of the line he was all like “Oh! So you’re the sister!” Or at least that’s how the story was told to me. At work today, I got a text from my wife saying that the book showed up this morning before she had to go to work. I was all excited all day. I got home and found the box wrapped in a dozen layers of saran wrap, one of my arch enemies. I maul it. For some reason the box was soggy anyways. Dunno how that was possible with all the saran, but the books were ok.

The best part is on the inside of the book it says “For Mike – Good like with all your own words. Tobias Buckell”

It’s kind of amazing how motivating a few little words from someone I’ve not met in person can be.