Gmail has this wonderful feature which shows the first line of an email next to the subject line. This evening I was checking my email and saw something from CICADA (a highly prestigious, professional magazine) which said:

Dear Ms. Kowal: I’m drafting an acceptance letter for “This Little Pig” and w

In a state of excitement I clicked on it to see what came after the “w” but gmail gave me an error message and said it couldn’t perform that function and to try again in a few seconds. I did. It gave me the same error message. By this point I am about ready to gnaw on the keyboard, but still can’t see more than that tantalizing first line. I wait.

I refresh.

I wait some more.

Finally, I realize that there’s a chance that the email went to my Other Hand Productions email address, which forwards to gmail, so I go to that mail box. Behold! There is the email.

Dear Ms. Kowal:

I’m drafting an acceptance letter for “This Little Pig” and want to verify your address. Your ms shows Portland, Oregon, while your SASE has Chattanooga, Tennessee. Which one is your current mailing address?

I’ll look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

Deborah Vetter
Executive Editor, CRICKET and CICADA

While this isn’t an actual official acceptance, it’s close enough for me to do all kinds of happy dances. I told her that both addresses forward to Reykjavik.

Cicada.

I can’t believe it.

We went to dinner at Tveir Fiskar (Two Fish) last night. Poor Rob has such a bad head cold that he can’t taste anything. He said that even the blue cheese on his salad was only barely present.

The rest of us quite enjoyed our food, I think.

As a starter everyone ordered the Martha’s Vineyard Salad with blue cheese, red onion and pine nuts, but I ordered the lightly smoked guillemot with onion marmalade and crow berry vinaigrette. I thought I might as well taste things that I can’t taste outside of Iceland. They don’t mention the buckshot, but I suppose that is because there was only one tiny lead ball per serving. It did at a delicate zing to the meal.

After that, Rob and I moved onto the Icelandic seafood soup “bouillabaisse,” which had blue mussels, scallops, salmon, shrimp and lobster in it. Pat had the salmon and Glenn had a whale steak, which tastes like steak. The fastest way to remember that a whale is a mammal is to eat it. Otherwise you just think its a big fish and it is so profoundly mammalian.

We tried the creme brulee, but alas, the texture was wrong. I haven’t had a good one here yet. I’ll keep trying though.