Dear Sarah,

Stuart McLean asked me to drop you a line on his behalf to thank you for your letter and for your submission to the Vinyl Café Story Exchange. He was glad to hear that you enjoyed your first live Vinyl Café concert and tickled pink that you came to find him at the stage door. He's pretty confident that the police cruisers that you saw were not there to manage rowdy hoards of Vinyl Café fans...but you never know! By the way, Robert Munsch happens to be a friend of Stuart's too. I thought you might be interested to know that.

Thanks for the story about your dad. That is indeed inspiring. As you can imagine, we receive thousands of submissions for the story exchange so we can't guarantee that they will be read on air, but if we do decide to read yours we promise to let you know in advance.

All the best for the New Year.
Regards,
Louise Curtis
The Vinyl Café

I got that letter in the mail today, totally unexpected! What I didn't write about in my Holiday re-cap was that in late November I went to see the Vinyl Café live. It was a great show, and perfect for the Holidays. I won't go into much detail about how nerdy I was afterwards, but I did try to see him at the stage door (fail. There were two cop cars hanging out right in front of the door in the alley, and I didn't want to stand there like an idiot.), but I was inspired enough to write him a letter for their Story Exchange, and amongst other things, I wrote to him about how awesome I think it is that my dad started snowboarding at age 52, and has been pretty hardcore about it ever since (he's 60 now, and I'm pretty damn proud about it!)

It was a really nice thing to come home to - that letter. It was all personalized and everything. They actually read the story...and then replied uniquely! That's better than Santa Claus!

In other news - I'm going to make my first lasagne (from scratch - thanks mom) today, and I walked down Main street, where I purchased yarn for a friend's custom knitting order, and (something similar to) this:

It's a moustache cup! The insert at the top of the cup is to make sure that your moustache doesn't get full of tea! I bought it at a little antique shop on Main that also featured a "museum" of pictures, masks and oddities from the south pacific islands! A little quirky, but that's the way I roll.