Oh Abra! How I've missed you!

Abra Moore is back!

Taxicab Nightmare

It was a quiet Sunday morning. I left my hotel early after the big show to head off to LaGuardia airport to catch my 10 o'clock flight. Little did I know what horrors would ensue. My first mistake, hailing a taxi cab. I should have just let the Hotel bellboy catch me one. But no, I was cheap and didn't want to pay a tip. The cab driver didn't quite understand what I meant by LaGuardia. That should have been the first major warning. And then when he accepted me in and we headed down the wrong direction on a one-way street (with 4 lanes of oncoming traffic), I should have asked him to just drop me off at the nearest street corner immediately. But no, I was patient. That is until I realize he didn't know where he was going. By that point we were crossing the Brooklyn bridge and it was too late. For the next hour and 15 minutes, I was taken on an excrutiately slow ride through Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. At one point, I saw an exit sign for Long Island and almost fainted. I panicked. I pleaded with the driver, but he had no clue where he was going. He was constantly checking a map, calling another cab driver for advice, going very slowly, taking illegal turns, missing green lights and passing red ones. Then when my time started to slip away, I pleaded in tears to get me to the airport. I was going to miss my flight. I made a tearful call to my parents and continued to beg the driver to hurry up. He kept saying sorry and not to worry about the fare. I wasn't worried about the fare. I was worried about missing my flight!

Finally, we reach the airport and I breathe a sigh of relief. I tell the driver to drop me off at the USAirways terminal. The driver takes me to the first terminal he sees, the Delta Airlines one. At that point, I started screaming at him to get me to the right terminal. So he went around and only half-stopped at a stop sign, and then proceeded to rear-end the vehicle in front of him. The man from the other car started screaming and cursing at him. At that point I knew my contract with the driver had ended, he no longer could deliver me to my destination. I grabbed my things and bolted out of there without paying the driver one cent. I pleaded with a Hertz shuttle bus driver, who had seen the accident, to help me. I was shaking and sobbing uncontrollably. He was sympathetic and took me to my terminal. A couple on the bus, gave me some tissues as I told them about my hellish joyride through the burroughs.

I caught my flight just in the nick of time. They had started boarding when I got there. If the driver hadn't crashed into another car, he would have probably taken me to another wrong terminal or I would have had to negotiate some discount (the fare was at $45). But instead, I got a life lesson, free trip and a story to tell.

I'm so excited...

"and I just can't hide it. I'm about to lose control and I think I like it..."

Just one more day before I fly off to NY for a whirlwind weekend at the big show. I find myself trying to do 10 things at once getting ready to prepare. I figured just packing would be a 3-4 day process and I started on Monday. I can't say much about it specifically, so I'll talk generally. My schedule will be jam-packed with travel, customer service, networking, booth-maintenance and partying. Yes that's right. Us book-folk like to party hardy! We make absolutely any excuse to get together and have fun. You wouldn't necessarily think of book people that way, but we are social creatures by necessity. Our job is people and we are constantly connecting with each other. Authors are celebrities, teachers and librarians are nurturers, book buyers are demi-gods and publishers are creative beacons.

Off I go to do some more packing and fill numerous small 3 0z, plane-friendly tubes with various beauty gooks. Wish me luck! I'll try to post some pictures when I come back

Why I don't talk about work...

 
It's far too dangerous.
 
Publisher's Weekly Article: The Big Chill

Blast from the Past!

At the wee age of 17, after attending the Lilith Fair, I decided to marry my fervor for a new type of music with my desire to make a mark on the internet and created a fan website. The celebrity was Abra Moore, a talented singer, not terribly famous but well-known amongst a devoted following and in the late '90s, at the height of her success. The plan was that information was manageable and traffic would be moderate. Exactly what I needed to start up my very first website.

I never quite completed it. It was more work than I had imagined and I still to this day don't quite have the knack of HTML coding. But I'm proud of my little venture.

It's not up any more but thanks to Archive.org you are able to see a bare-bones archived copy of my site.

Raquel's Abra Moore Website
http://web.archive.org/web/20010711181029/members.aol.com/gerenukz/music.html

If you've ever had a burr stick to your clothes...

... and liked it, then please please please check out this website.

Joie de Vivre et Joie de Blog

I've been shamefully neglecting this poor blog. My mind wanders back to it on ocassion but when I start to contemplate it's future I only come with ideas for several other blogs. What hinders me most about this blog is it's title. I'm thinking of either changing it or abandoning it completely for other potential projects. For example...
 
A book blog would be fun to write. I'm not terribly good at writing reviews (I'll leave that to Bev who's a born professional in that department), so my blog would be more about the book business. But the business is so broad. Would I focus on publishing versus bookselling? Since I'm in children's publishing, would it be focused on children's books? All of this presents a major dilemma, which is personal and professional bias. I'd basically be raving about the company I work for and all the excellent books we produce. Plus it would be a financial burden to buy books from other publishers to keep up with the joneses. Who's going to send free galleys to someone who works at a rival publisher! Scratch that idea right off the bat!
More realistic ideas include a classic movie blog. That would be exciting. But it wouldn't be full of boring movie reviews. No! It would have movie-inspired articles. I could talk about my passion for blonde-Bette Davis films, how I'm half in love with Richard Barthelmess and how Norma Shearer is highly under-rated as an actress and as a woman. It would also be a vehicle to express my love and devotion to Turner Classic Movies and to recognize Netflix, which has an awe-inspiring variety of classic DVDs for rental which allows me to feed the fire!
 
My other idea, which is my personal favorite, would be a blog chronicling my Spring and Summer. I've made plans to have the most fun-filled summer ever! I'm filling my calendar with lots of exciting things to do. My goal is to develop my social life and become more adventurous and outgoing. I'm obligating myself to accept more invitations even at the cost of slight personal embarassment or discomfort, which is just simply a result of my deep-seated shyness. I actually started this new experiment in March and have so far attended or planned 10 social events. So if I want to chronicle this new chapter in my life, I need to start straight away!
 
Well here's to happy adventures in blogging and a potentially life-altering year!

 

Soaring

I'm flying to Indiana tomorrow for a business trip. Will be spending sometime looking at a warehouse full of children's books. Woohoo! If I weren't such a book nerd, this trip would be much less exciting. I was contemplating wearing my new bright red H&M trenchcoat, but I think I will chicken out and wear the khaki one. Ever since watching Love Actually, I've been desperate for a bright red winter coat. Now that I have one, I'm terrified to wear it. What if people stare at me?!

Anyways, I'm off to compensate for my weakness by painting my nails bright red. That oughta do it. Wish me luck on my trip, I'm terrified of airplanes and the one I'll be going on is super duper small! I'm flying white-knuckle all the way.

Brilliant Idea

It's amazing what you can think up whilst in the throes of ennui. The other day, I was driving with my mom and we had a lengthy conversation about various types of miscellanea. In the midst of this, I hit upon said "brilliant idea". It occured to me that IF milk can be produced into cheese that it would be possible to turn coconut milk into coconut cheese. You could possibly make a sweet soft cheese or maybe a more acidic hard cheese. I wasn't quite sure if bacteria or mold would need to be involved, as is often the case with cow's milk cheese. My mind thus began racing. I could introduce my new food invention into Latin American countries and call it CoQueso (which is the marriage of the words "coconut" and "queso" [Spanish for "cheese"]). And if it was popular there, I could bring it to the US as an alternate cheese for vegans or a great product for coconut afficianados. There could be coconut cheesecake, coconut cheese frosting for cakes, amongst various other desserts.

It wouldn't make my millions off of coconut cheese, but if it was successful it would be a nice venture. So why am I divulging my brilliant idea for CoQueso (patent pending)? Because 10 years earlier someone had already thought up the idea. Ahh well!

http://www.unido.org/userfiles/PuffK/ISED_R85.pdf