Birthday quotes for a niece

TLDR: The ordeal of doing a custom powdercoat finish on a Freewrite Smart Typewriter. And I ask what color I should attempt next.
The Pastel Turquoise Freewrite Story
A few years ago I got the (not-so) bright idea to create a one-of-a-kind custom-color Freewrite and it blew up in my face. Let me go back to the beginning...
In 2014 when Astrohaus introduced what was then called the Hemingwrite on Kickstarter I got wind of it and followed its journey. In 2015 I trekked to the Astrohaus Manhattan office with a friend to see an early production version. I was at the radio station WFMU at the time and had this vague idea of talking the Astrohaus marketing department into giving the station a Freewrite to use as a prize during an upcoming fundraising Marathon. We could put the device in front of a ton of professional writers while getting ourselves a kick-ass prize. We were led to a conference room where the first iteration of the Freewrite awaited us. I tried it out, then my friend. We kept our thoughts to ourselves as the marketing rep talked up the machine.
"It's distraction-free writing. Built for one purpose."
Yes, but will people pay for what appears to be a glorified word processor?
We left the Astrohaus offices and my friend and I expressed our reservations.
"Still, if we could get them to donate one..."
We couldn't. They didn't see the value in accessing WFMU's artistic community.
"Oh well. Good lucking selling your machine!"
All the while I stayed on the Astrohaus mailing list, searched for used Freewrites on EBay, read every online review and watched all the YouTube videos. I wondered if a device guaranteeing distraction-free writing could help with my concentration. When I'm writing on my MacBook or iMac there's always something that gets through: email notifications, texts, breaking news. I never remember to mute notifications or use Airplane Mode. Again and again I go down various rabbit holes, spending ten or fifteen minutes replying to emails (mostly trashing junk emails), responding to texts, checking the news, or wasting time on social media. But I kept putting off the actual purchase of a Freewrite, despite my love of typewriters and memories of my mother's hulking black Royal upon which I learned to type. Then the Hemingwrite came along. Astrohaus revived the original name of the Freewrite but this time it was authorized by the Ernest Hemingway estate. When I saw the first photos of the polished aluminum exterior and green keys I thought "That thing is sweet." But even with the extras–the carrying case, etc.–I couldn't see ponying up the asking price, even for a "limited-edition" of "only" 200 pieces.
"That's what I paid for my Macbook a few years ago."
But the emails from Astrohaus kept coming and I kept opening them. On the cusp of a milestone birthday I decided to indulge and buy a Hemingwrite as a gift to myself... and a future investment.
"I can finally write that book about the Nihilistics..."
The Nihilistics is the New York Hardcore band I founded and named at the end of the '70s. I'd written a few short pieces about the band, centered around my relationship with the bass playelyrics writer Mike (RIP). I referred to him as "...the booster rocket that helped me achieve escape velocity, falling back to earth in the process." One of my short stories about the band got published and I had a boutique publisher interested in the full story.
"I'll write the book on the Hemingwrite!"
When the box with my new distraction-free writing tool arrived (within a day or two of ordering) I moved it around from our porch to the office to our dining room but couldn't bring myself to open it.
"I don't deserve this thing. I can't justify the cost. Is it too late to return it?"
This went on for six weeks.
"If it IS too late to return it maybe I can put it on EBay. I should be able to get my money back. But I sure would like to see it first."
Then I finally freed the Hemingwrite from its box (I thought of doing an unboxing video but didn't). I gingerly cut open the tape on the box and extracted the leather carrying case from its bag. I opened the case and thought "This thing is sexy." It hadn't occurred to me there wouldn't be enough of a charge to use the Hemingwrite out of the box. But I started typing on it anyway, figuring I could charge it overnight and get the full experience in the morning.
"It's like mom's IBM Selectric..."
My mother owned one of the early Selectrics with the swappable type element (I still have on of the elements: the typewriter is long gone, as is the Royal). Typing on the Selectric was a fully tactile experience, just like the Hemingwrite. There's even the same delay between key-strike and "imprint," as I discovered the next morning after a full charge.
"I guess I'm not sending this back. Or selling it on EBay."
Since it arrived and I finally decided to use it, I've been on my Hemingwrite every day, cranking out a weekly newsletter and my book distraction-free. Every once in awhile I admire the bare aluminum case and remind myself I earned this damn thing and plan to keep it and pass it on to some deserving soul many years from now. There are things I'd change–could there be a spellcheck function, for instance? – but those who scoff at this tool haven't spent enough time with one. They don't "get" it. I got it. And I'm glad I did.
Fast forward a bit and Astrohaus decides to sell more "limited-edition" Hemingwrites. I wrote to the company, reminding them what their own Marketing department said about only producing 200 pieces. They responded with a bullshit excuse: this is not the same machine as yours, we've updated the internals. Well, no one bought it for the internals. It felt like a betrayal and I questioned how I could go about creating a custom-color Freewrite of my own and perhaps sell my Hemingwrite to recoup my costs. I managed to buy a stock black Gen. 2 Freewrite for $350 and $25 shipping. Before I could think about disassembling the Freewrite a friend expressed interest in it and I brought the machine to him, where it sat boxed under his couch for almost half a year. He was going through issues with the health of his parents and finally decided not to buy my Freewrite, so I went and retrieved it. Then I revived the idea of putting a custom color on it and selling my Hemingwrite.
There are no online instructions for taking a Freewrite apart, so with great trepidation I brought the Freewrite out to my garage workbench and proceeded as carefully as possible. It's a bit harrowing, thinking you might destroy a machine for which you've paid $$$. But after an hour of stomach-churning, detail-oriented work I got the aluminum shell separated from the innards of the machine and put all the electronic parts safely away in the Freewrite box. Because I didn't fully power down the Freewrite first, a black bar appeared across the E-Ink display and I was convinced I destroyed it. I kept calm and carried on. Next, I did some research online on removing a powder coat finish from aluminum. Initially, I thought the shell could be media-blasted (they don't call it sand-blasting any longer) but you can't media-blast aluminum without potentially dimpling the surface. It's suggested you use a powerful paint stripper and I opted for Jasco (approx. $28) based on discussions in a powder-coat forum. The Jasco stripper is nasty stuff and the only way to use it safely is outdoors while wearing heavy disposable gloves, eye protection and a respirator. I took the Freewrite to my backyard, put it on a folding aluminum table and began brushing it with the Jasco stripper. When done I let it sit the suggested twenty minutes for the Jasco stripper to do its work. Then, using a plastic scraper (you can't use a metal scraper on aluminum) I began trying to remove the powder-coat finish. It didn't go well. I removed some of the finish but most of it remained and I was confronted with three choices: sand the rest of the finish off, try another application of the Jasco stripper or bite the bullet and get it media-blasted anyway. I decided to try another application of the Jasco stripper the following day, this time leaving it on for thirty minutes. Then I went at the powder-coat with the plastic scraper again. I had to use a combo of large and small scrapers to get into all the recesses of the Freewrite's shell. But the Jasco stripper is not a miracle worker and much of the powder-coat stubbornly remained. I pivoted to multiple grades of steel wool, from 0 to 0000. This took several hours of meticulous work but when I was done I was presented with something that looked very much like my Hemingwrite. Believe me, it stung to know Astrohaus is selling a raw-finish Freewrite (sure, it's "hand-buffed") with green keycaps and accents at a substantial premium and I thought of stopping there and using a spare set of green keycaps I own to create an ersatz Hemingwrite. But that was never my intent, so I pushed on with the custom color idea, posting a poll to the Freewrite community on Facebook, asking which color they'd like to see on a Freewrite. Astrohaus, in addition to the Hemingwrite, produced and sold a blue Freewrite and a cream Freewrite (this is before the Mint and Lemon editions) that garner a premium on EBay. The poll revealed "Green" to be the favored choice for a custom color so I did a Photoshop mock-up of red and green Freewrites and put them on the Facebook group. The response was positive. I called around to a bunch of local powder-coating places only to find they concentrate on automobile rims and little else. I even drove the Freewrite shell to one place only to be quoted a price of $150, which seemed a bit much. Then I remembered a place I used previously, up in Kingston, NY, a two hour drive north for me. We have friends in the Catskills and decided to cart the Freewrite to Kingston and stay overnight. A week later we returned to Kingston and retrieved the Freewrite, paying $50 for the Pastel Turquoise powder-coat it received. Now I had to put it all back together. THAT was a nightmare. Believe it or not, the spring on the power button gave me the greatest difficulty. I labored over THAT thing a solid hour to get it functioning properly. The rest of the reassembly was fraught as well, and there was still the issue of the black box on the E-Ink display. Luckily, this went away after I let the Freewrite charge overnight and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
After posting pictures of the newly-finished Freewrite to the Astrohaus Facebook group and garnering an enthusiastic response, I decided to sell it and earn back what I spent in time, materials and labor. To me, a fair price would fall somewhere between $600–$700, based on recent EBay sales of stock Gen. 2 Freewrites ($325–$425), the cost of materials (Jasco Stripper, $28, powder-coating, $50), hours of disassembly, stripping of the finish, driving four hours round-trip to/from Kingston, reassembly, taking of pictures and posting an EBay listing. All that work is apart from the fact I produced a one-of-a-kind (AKA TRULY limited-edition) custom-color Freewrite. When I created the EBay listing I chose to start at $400 and not set a reserve price (EBay wanted $52 for the reserve price in addition to a final value and listing fee), hoping the enthusiasm in the Facebook group would reflect in healthy bidding activity. It did not. One person bid on my Pastel Turquoise Freewrite and I was faced with the prospect of selling it for $425, a price I might've seen if I'd left it black and not gone through all the effort to transform it. So I cancelled the sale and refunded the buyer's money immediately. I've been buying and selling on EBay almost 25 years and did not take this step lightly. The buyer, understandably upset, took to the Facebook Freewrite group and expressed his profound disappointment. Someone else decided to wade in and run down my character, describing what I did (cancelling the sale) as "borderline scammy behavior." Wow. I'm not sure who he thinks is being scammed but I'd like to see a show of hands for anyone who's wiling to work for free, what I'd be doing if I accepted $425 for my custom-color Freewrite. Yes, I could've and should've handled things differently. I might've offered the Freewrite on the Facebook group, setting a price I felt comfortable with. Or used a higher starting price or set a reserve on EBay. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. But in no way, shape or form was I trying to "scam" anyone. Eventually, the buyer and I came to an agreement and he paid what I consider a fair price for the custom-color Freewrite. I also fell out of love with my Hemingwrite, due to the horrid software and ergonomics (I was getting bad neck strain from looking down at the screen for hours) and kept pestering Astrohaus, going further up the foodchain until they took back my Hemingwrite and issued a full refund. Now another Freewrite has fallen into my lap (it’s a friend’s who can no longer stand the machine’s peccadilloes) and I'm on the cusp of possibly creating another custom-color Freewrite to increase its value for a sale. I’d love to be talked out of it, BTW.
Thanks, Chris T.

I won’t be linking to Kendra’s tweets about Holly after her book came out. I think we all know about them and they’re on Google. This is a timeline on the backstory leading up to the 2015 tweets detailing their feud up to that point. Basically, I feel that there has been a long history of covert, subtle bullying from Holly to Kendra.
For starters, look at the book recaps with quotes both Holly and Kendra made toward each other.
Kendra’s book comments about Holly
While Holly and Bridget were aghast calling Kendra’s book ‘lies’, a lot of what they called out as lies were either a matter of interpreting her retelling of events from her perspective, or have some plausibility.
Like her ‘lie’ about not sleeping with Hef before moving in. If you read the excerpt from her book, it’s just a matter of when Kendra officially became a girlfriend after what was essentially a ‘trial run’.
She was still with her boyfriend the night of the party (the same one who sold her sex tape and 'pissed' she left for Hef, so I can see her trying to smooth it over given what happened later) where she was a painted lady, but admits to sleeping with Hef 'a couple of days later' after attending Casablanca night, then a club night, sleeping with Hef on the third date:
On the ride home one of the girls asked me if I wanted to go upstairs into Hefs room with everyone once we got back to the Mansion. In my head I could hear my mom's voice: You know they have orgies up there
Her big 'lie' was to be off by a few days.
Or the idea of Hef asking her to move in the first night without a ‘casting couch’ situation—Playmate and ex-girlfriend Stephanie Heinrich describes a very similar courtship
Holly and Bridget were taken aback at the ‘lie’ that Kendra felt lost at the mansion and wandered around, but in the commentary both things happened—Kendra was overwhelmed and Bridget helped. The retelling doesn’t make it a lie. Or that Kendra said they didn’t re-wear outfits when they did, and Izabella spoke about the pressure to always have new, non-repeat outfits for promotional/press events and Kendra didn’t specify the difference.
Any comments about Holly in ‘Sliding into Home’ basically boil down to ‘we weren’t close at first, her focus was Hef, our interests were different, but we grew closer over the course of the show’.
But in her ‘retaliation’ through her book, there are nonstop digs at Kendra, both subtle and explicit. To name just a few: a loudmouth, entitled, lazy person who fried her brain with drugs.
Holly’s book comments about Kendra
Seriously, she goes in on Kendra.
During the course of the show, there are some revealing moments in the form of passive-aggressive digs at her over the commentary here and here
And a couple out of so many examples of Holly changing the topic on any Kendra-relates scenes to not have attention on her here and here
This article cites reporting from Page Six about the end being near for GND and that Holly and Kendra are fighting:
“Holly and Bridget hate her,” a friend of Wilkinson told Page Six. “They’re totally jealous. She has her own empire now. She’s got a clothing line, a modeling career and an exercise empire. They’re just sitting there hangin’ with Hef.” The friend expounds, “Kendra was never really Hef’s girlfriend. She was cast for the show [E!’s ‘The Girls Next Door’] because Bridget and Holly are old, and they needed a young hot girl for Hef. She was selected from a bunch of Playmate wannabes.” Madison is 28, Marquardt, 34. Wilkinson celebrated her 21st birthday last year. Wilkinson is said to be eyeing her exit from “The Girls Next Door” and the famed mansion next season. “She’s definitely out,” her friend said. “There are too many rules and Holly and Bridget want her gone. They’re so mean to her.”
Holly responded on her MySpace that the article was a lie, and she and Kendra get along fine with no jealousy, only to make a bunch of digs at her expense:
“The latest Page 6 story is especially dumb. Saying I am jealous of Kendra because she has an "empire" and I'm "just sitting around with Hef"? What "empire"? I guess because I have a real full-time job aside from The Girls Next Door (excuse me for having a brain and having something REAL going on in my life as opposed to following in the footsteps of the socialite-of-the-week) means I am "sitting around" doing nothing. I guess having people announce clothing lines and workout products that never come to fruition means you are doing something.”
https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/25635091.html
In Kendra’s 2011 book ‘Being Kendra’ she wrote:
Of course I’d had relationship with people like Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt in the past, but they were really just roommates, not close friends. We shared a boyfriend, we shared the spotlight, but now that I’m a mom we’re all just in different places. I just changed. I think it’s something that just happens naturally when you become a mom. You just grow up. Someone like Holly has a different lifestyle from me. I love her but I don’t know the people she hangs out with—they are more on the party scene, and I’ve put those days behind me. We still talk (she always gave me amazing words of encouragement during Dancing with the Stars and sent me fun little notes) but being a Vegas showgirl and constantly on the prowl for a new boyfriend . . . that’s her world, not mine. When it came to the baby, people like that just weren’t around. I was very alone.
[this 2015 article](RadarOnlinehttps://radaronline.com › photos › h...holly madison kendra wilkinson feud hank baskett ...) goes into their falling out—basically that Holly called Kendra fake, and her husband Hank wanted her to distance herself from Playboy:
"He wanted no ties to anyone from her Playboy lifestyle even though that's how Kendra and Hank got together," the friend claimed.
"A lot of it has to do with the fact that Kendra lacked a father figure," the friend claimed. "She just sought father figures in the relationships that she was in."
I would have expected some empathy from Holly towards Kendra on this one; Holly has admitted to losing herself in relationships trying to please her partners, and she also went through a period where she was trying to distance herself from Playboy completely.
Shaded Kendra in this 2013 interview:
Wilkinson herself has a 3-year-old son, yet the 33-year-old Madison has revealed that she still talks to Bridget Marquardt, but not Wilkinson or Hugh Hefner. Madison explained that: ''Bridget and I are still friends, but I don't talk to anyone else. I moved on from the whole Playboy thing five years ago and really never looked back. I'm not one of those girls who goes back to all the parties and things.''
“I tried to be friends with her. I’ve known about three different Kendra’s since I met her.”
“Here was a rookie who had just gone all the way with an old dude and her only concern was how big her room was going to be”
And finally, the nail in the coffin for the ‘we were never really friends’ tweet. Before, there had been a couple of years of Holly vague-tweeting where a couple of fans asked if she was talking about Kendra (screenshots attached)
In her book, Holly wrote:
The next thing I heard from her was a headline she retweeted: Kendra reveals why she is no longer friends with Holly and Bridget!
The actual tweet is that they ‘no longer talk’, but Holly changed it to the harsher ‘no longer friends’.
And the big, damning quote from Kendra was: "We've all found our own little roads to go and that's just the way it goes,"
According to her book, it was actually Holly that lashed out first and insulted Kendra via text, who then replied ‘we were never friends’
I retweeted her post, saying: Thanks for letting me know, Kendra! Of course I wasn't going to stoop to her level and address this only on social media, so I decided to text her how I truly felt: that she was a coward and that she tried to act like the "real" girl on TV, but she's the fakest person I've ever met -and that if she had a problem with me, she should have confronted me like an adult instead of just going silent. This time Kendra responded and the exchange went something like this: Girl, I don't have a problem with you. I just don't like it when people think we are friends, she texted. Do you even have a clue how rude that sounds, what you just said? I replied. WHO ARE YOU????? I DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU! WE WERE NEVER FRIENDS. IT WAS ALL JUST WORK! she responded in all caps. Wow, I'm sorry I was stupid enough to think we were really friends. Have a nice life, I finally texted. After that, I deleted her number from my phone. Kendra and I haven't spoken since, and I have to say, I don't miss her.
In the screenshots attached, although I can’t source the original tweets, it seems that more than once she was vague-tweeting messages that fans wondered if they were about Kendra; enough for Holly to have to clarify that she has ‘never tweeted anything mean about Kendra’
Finally, in 2013 tweeted about Kendra being ‘on the payroll’, yet again putting her down for making her own way.
—————————————- So for all of this lead-up, a constant, steady stream of covert bullying since the inception of the show, by the time Kendra read about how Holly portrayed her, she’d had enough.
And this is just going off of information that is publicly available.

Cake is Claire Saffitz’s Confetti Cake, and frosting is Stella Parks’s Swiss Meringue Buttercream