scenes from a slaughter(and a surprise at the end)

I'm still getting used to my new/old camera and its features, so I apologize for the general crappiness of the following images. These pics were taken at Charles's abode on Saturday.

First up, we've got the fondue. On the left you see a metal bowl holding tiny cubes of Gruyère and Emmenthaler cheese, tossed with cornstarch. On the right, sitting on its burner, is the Korean earthenware crock serving as a caquelon. The Korean crocks are actually better, in my opinion, than the Swiss caquelons.

Next up, we have a snapshot of the prep for the choucroute alsacienne. The kitchen seems strangely devoid of human life, Captain. Perhaps the sausages rose up and ate their masters?





The completed, messy choucroute appears below:





In the following picture, we see the awful massacre of the choucroute in progress. I'm going to win a Pulitzer for this. I can feel it.





Finally, there's this image:




Uh... I neglected to tell my public that I did a short run of my book, Water from a Skull, at the local printer's, and it's well-made stuff. The CafePress PDF issues still have not been resolved, but if you are impatient to own a copy of my book, please do one of the following:

1. If you're in Korea, please email me your request plus your mailing address, and I'll bill you W20,000 plus shipping, which you can send via account-to-account wire transaction, or via PayPal, though I might charge you a wee bit extra if you elect to use PayPal, because PayPal, as you know, sneakily nibbles off a few percent from every transaction. By "wee bit extra," I mean I'll charge no more than a dollar.

2. If you're outside of Korea, please email me your request plus your mailing address, and I'll bill you $21.95 plus shipping and PayPal.

In both cases, I won't bill you until after I know the exact amount I'll be paying to ship the book to you. I need to find out whether Korea has the equivalent of "media mail," a classification that can be applied to books. Shipping something "media mail" is much cheaper than posting it the normal way, but the delivery time is correspondingly longer. We use the "media mail" designation in America, but is it used on the peninsula?

So, no: the book hasn't made its official debut yet. There will be much fanfare on that day, and readers in America will pay much less to have the CafePress book shipped to them. This Korea-printed edition might best be considered "advance copies."

Now, if only I could earn as much from this book as JK Rowling is bound to earn from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...




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