Letters...We get Letters...

Actually today, it's postcards that I'm more concerned about, though I did get a couple of very nice letters.

I have been on PostCrossing for over a year now. I have exchanged somewhere near 300 postcards with people around the world, cards which have traveled, my stats tell me, 1,630,078 miles. I am part of a group of people who have sent, over the years, more than ten million postcards!

Pretty impressive numbers.

This is what my map looks like:

(This isn't entirely accurate, though, because I have received a couple of post cards from Brasil and I notice that South America isn't tagged here and I've had a card from South Africa, though Africa isn't marked either.)

I have been tossing postcards in a box for a year and today I got a bee in my bonnett and decided to sort them by country.

Every surface within my reach was covered with a stack of post cards. It was a surprise to me that I had at least three times more cards from the U.S. than from any other country. I rarely send cards to the US and hadn't realized that I had received so many.

I was also surprised to discover that I had received the most cards from Germany. I would have bet that it was Finland or the Netherlands, but Germany had the thickest pile, with Finland and the Netherlands probably the next thickest.

I have a lot of cards from China, Taiwan (all of whose residents have a very distinctive handwriting, I discovered), and from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

There were several countries from which I have received only one postcard: Croatia, Norway, Turkey, South Africa, Thailand, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, Italy, Belgium, Moldovia, Estonia, Trinidad & Tobago, and Slovenia.

And I love the dellightful Inge Löök old lady cards from Finland. I only have a few of them, but I'm all ready to go back to Helsinki and go looking for them! Löök was born in Helsinki and her cards remind me of Char and me...how much fun we would have had when we were in that city shopping for cards!

It's also interesting how people write their postcards. Most write short things about the picture on the front, or about their lives (that's what I do, mostly), some write amazingly long personal notes in teeny, tiny print. The disappointing ones are the ones that come with nothing on it, or just "happy postcrossing."

The only down side of Postcrossing (other than the increasing cost of international postage!) is that you don't really make friends on the site. You have the address of someone to mail a card to but unless you want to include your own address, the recipient doesn't have your address. I have received one or two personal messages, but mostly this is about the cards and not findings friends. Still, I have received some really fun cards. If you'd like to see my favorites, you can follow this link.

I also made a major dent in the letters I have not answered during (a) Christmas, (b) my mother's pneumonia, and (c) the computer problems. Still a long way to go, but I'm getting there!

Five letters today alone, along with a bunch of post cards mailed! What's nice about this pen pal project is that some of these pen pals are starting to feel like friends. That's nice.

Wasting Time on the Internet

It was about 1 a.m. last night when I discovered a fabulous new time-waster on the internet, one which would combine a couple of my other time-wasting activities on the internet.

I requested a new address from Postcrossing, so I could send another postcard. When you do that you get an e-mail with the ID number of the card you are to send, the address of where it is to go, and a brief bio written by the person who will be receiving your card. This helps you choose a good card for that person. Some people, for example, love getting homemade cards, other people hate them. Some like animal cards, others prefer scenic cards, most don't like "free" cards (the kind you pick up at a restaurant, for example).

But few are as persnickety as "David," the guy who was to be getting my next card. His bio starts out with a complaint: I received six postcards in two weeks without any ID whatsoever, and a further two cards with incorrect ID numbers. This is getting ridiculous!

He then goes on to lay out his preferences: I prefer viewcards measuring 15cm X 10cm (6 X 4 inches) and if possible showing a serial number, although not all cards have serial numbers. Please DO NOT send hand-made, ad-cards, self-made photographs, greetings cards (e.g. Christmas, New Year, Easter), art cards, drawings, shaped cards, black-and-white/sepia cards etc. My favourite cards include places of interest, for example: castle, palace, ruin, abbey, monastery, church, cathedral, temple, mosque, monument, city, mountains, volcano, custom, tradition, nature, ancient or modern architecture - something I would like to see if I came to your area.

Of course this guy has been a member of Postcrossing for over 4 years, has sent 3,800 cards and received 3,723 cards. He boasts that he has over 106,000 cards from the 1960s.

He's also from England. After reading through his very specific rules and rather prickly messages, I had a mental image of this old guy (57...just a kid) in a small apartment in some sort of Dickensonian house, hunched over his card collection in his library.

Then I got this great idea. I realized I could look him up on Google Earth (if you don't have this program you are missing out on a lot of fun!). Not only could I look him up on Google earth and see the area where he lives from an overhead angle, but there were street photos, so I could actually virtually stand on his street and look around 360 degrees. (turns out it's a more modern area than I imagined and I guess he's not the kind of person I pictured anyway).

Then I figured out what a wonderful tool Google Earth would be to enhance the enjoyment of getting a postcard from a stranger halfway around the world, so I spent the next hour looking up people on Google Earth. I discovered that some countries don't allow street photos (or they haven't been taken yet), so I could only see the rooftops of the girl who sent me a photo from Lithuania, for example.

A photo from Holland looked similar to the neighborhood in England...

..but nothing like the neighborhood in Taiwan.

or Queensland, Australia

I was disappointed in the places that didn't have street views (Germany, Tasmania, Poland, Malaysia, Austria, Belgium, etc). The Russian arial views put up so much information that you had to read cyrillic script in order to figure out what you were looking for. And I haven't been able to enter information on some of the addresses (e.g., China and Portugal) in a format that Google Earth understands. But if nothing else, you can get a sense of the area where someone lives--near freeway? near water? in the countryside? small village?

This has added an entirely new dimension to Postcrossing!

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Quote of the day, from Facebook: Does anyone else see the irony in this tragedy? In Arizona, the state that has been the de facto “face” of recent political gay bashing (DADT-McCain) and racism (their highly controversial immigration law), a white straight man shoots a female Jewish member of congress who then has her life saved by a gay Hispanic American. It’s poetic

Mom's Refrigerator Door

Our refrigerator door is covered with magnets now. I usually pick up one or two whenever we travel (which means that my refrigerator door is now full of magnets. Many of the lower ones have become teething toys for dogs, so I try to make sure that the special ones are kept toward the top, out of dog range.

I love the latest one I got in Washington.

I actually had purchased a couple of postcards at the Newseum to send through the Postcrossing project. It became an instant favorite and I even had an e-mail from a guy in China asking if I could send him one of the postcards (fortunately I had bought 3 of them). I was thrilled when I found the postcard on a magnet because I loved the idea. I wonder if they ever designed a postcard like this before we had an African-American president...

As much as I enjoy the magnets, I think I prefer the days when the refrigerator was a place to display the kids' latest art work. We have a side-by-side now and I don't know if school artwork would fit, but back then we had a regular refrigerator with a freezer compartment above and so there was lots of uninterrupted blank space to display artwork.

For years there was a rotating display of art from each of the kids. When they got too old to have work to display, Jeri went off to college to study theatre design. When she completed her masters degree at UCD she brought home a rolled up piece of canvas on which was painted part of a backdrop for a show she had designed. She told me I didn't have to post it on the refrigerator door (good thing, since I would have had to wrap the refrigerator in it, it was so big!)

But now it appears we are entering a new era. Walt recently spent several days in Santa Barbara visiting his mother, while his sister and her husband are taking a short vacation. He had meals at Tom and Laurel's several times and he brought home this finger painting by Bri for me.

I'm not sure where I'm going to put it, since it's too wide for the refrigerator door, but I'm glad that I can scan it and post it here (even if it's too wide for my scanner to capture all of it.

I think it displays a remarkable artistic sense. First, paint takes over its shallow space. It gets denser, the painting's symmetry gets more obvious, and the technique gets varied and absorbing.

(OK...that was from a review of a Jackson Pollock painting, but just look at Bri's. It applies, right?)

I can hardly wait to start removing some of my magnets and replacing them with Bri-designed art work.

The Artist as a young girl