Bear delivery!

Today's delivery on an old-fashioned mail scale

So, I stroll into the office with a major case of the Mondays. There's a box from Amazon waiting for me, and since I've been a bit of a book glutton lately (ooh, Amazon Prime, you are a formidable foe), I assume it's one of the many things I ordered. 

But then I pick up the box--heavier than any book I've looked at. (I'll admit to preferring portable tomes. When one must carry all reading material all day, with nowhere to leave it--that is, in subway, versus car culture--all purse contents must be carefully chosen.) 

So I slice it open, and it's...gummi bears. Six pounds of them! Enough to not only make up the cast of a manuscript, but the crew and entire production team as well!

(Little known fact: it is perfectly all right to freeze bears and all members of the gummi animal kingdom. Just be careful, if you have an especially cold freezer--sometimes they get too hard and can be dangerous to teeth. But, in most freezers, they're a new, added chew-challenge--like extreme gummi sports.) 

My intern is going to flip out when she sees them.

So, though I generally advise against gifts, this one was well-executed on many fronts:

• I'd already had several pleasant e-mail conversations with the sender, and this is her second manuscript she's sent me. That is, I know who she is and like her. When I saw her name, even though it was a much more formal version that what she goes by, I recognized the sender immediately. 
• She'd joked with me about gummi bears after reading this post. 
• The note is short and, of course, sweet.
• The gift is straight from a distributor, not from a home address. Even if something were sealed, I wouldn't eat anything from a sender I don't know. There are a lot of angry writers out there. 

Again, gifts are generally not advised. But, for the aforementioned reasons, this was not only fun, but delightful. I've been staring down the bears for more than an hour...trying to wait until lunchtime. We shall see...