Thursday, December 2, 1999

by the Wunderland Toast Society

This week I find myself with very little time left to get this update done, nothing written, and not much to report on either. It's not for a lack of activity, mind you, in fact quite the opposite. Our Thanksgiving holiday was packed with socializing, and we're still frantically getting ready for the now-underway and still-ramping-up holiday shopping season. But there doesn't seem to be any particular theme to report on this week, it was just a very busy week.

For ThanksIndians, we had dinner with Kristin's family, dessert with mine, and of course, the ceremonial Toast and Popcorn at home that evening. Kristin's sister Ruth and her family came up from Texas for the holiday, and it was particularly enjoyable seeing her kids, Dustan and Jenelle. They've grown quite a bit since the last time we saw them, and we had a lot of fun playing games with them during their visit. On the other hand, the holiday had worrisome undertones this year amongst Kristin's family... her mom has been undergoing tests and treatments for a recurrence of the breast cancer she thought she'd beaten a decade ago. But thankfully, the prognosis is good... on Tuesday she had surgery and the news is really all good. The doctor was apparently quite convinced that he was able to remove all of the remaining cancer. So she's on the mend and will hopefully be with us for many holidays to come!

In the socialization category, we also spent another afternoon playing drums and didjeridoos in the woods with some of our local hippie friends. Dale Newfield stopped off to do some shopping while passing through on his way back to Charlottesville, and he ended up tagging along with us the drum circle... you can read more about it on Ginohn's news page.

On the work side of life, we've been continuing to polish up things about the site that we'd been meaning to improve for ages, like putting some hair product placement on the hair index and updating the way-out-of-date About Looney Labs page. The response to last week's call for Mad Lab Rabbits was fabulous, and it motivated us to quickly put together a roster page, using a bunch of new rabbit pictures Alison's been cranking out. Alison also assembled a bunch of Origami Icehouse sets this week, and in doing so, used up the last of our ancient, once-vast supply of die-cut cards. This was an amazing moment for us... we never would have imagined, back in '96 when we closed down Icehouse Games, that we'd someday use up that pile of origami pieces that had once seemed so infinite. (Of course it also means Kristin has a new manufacturing job ahead of her, since we obviously need to get more origami pieces made.)

Lastly, I've been writing (and doing comprehension testing of) the rules for Q-turn, and of course, we've been filling orders. Lots and lots of orders. We're quite happy with the way the season is going so far, but please... if you're planning to do your holiday shopping with us, don't wait until the last minute. We've made our best guesses on how much to stock up on over at Contagious Dreams, but you never can tell what we're going to run out of, and the later it gets, the harder it will be for us to restock in time.