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I’ve been wanting to buy some ink for my fountain pens, moving away from the boring blue and black cartridges. I’m having a hard time choosing, though, and a whole bottle of ink for $10+ that I might hate seems… blech. So I ordered some samples from Pear Tree Pens. You can order a sample of any ink they sell. They come in these teensy jars, with just enough ink them to fill your pen maybe two or three times, plenty to know if you want to buy a whole bottle or not. I haven’t opened them yet, but I’m going to later. Meanwhile, they look so pretty:

And some of the latest outgoing mail:

I’ve dreamed of Goldy almost every night for the last week or so. It’s always the same, we find him nearby, or he appears at the door. Either we find him dead or he appears at the door badly hurt. In all of them I cry and cry and cry and wake up feeling as though I’ve been crying, and very very sad.

It’s been a weird week. I’ve been crying a lot.

I haven’t written about this here, I don’t think, but I got a Mirena almost two years ago, not as birth control, but to help some serious complications of a fibroid. Yes, a single, small fibroid, caused me to nearly bleed to death a couple years ago. Anyway. The Mirena is a blessing because now I’m not dead and at this point, is my only real option, since without health insurance, I’m not likely to have a hysterectomy and for now, I think I’m okay with the Mirena. However. The fucking thing has caused me a lot of … Very Very VERY bad moods, plus I’m pretty sure hair loss. Thankfully, after about a year of really feeling I might go insane one month and, well, do something drastic (like yank the fucker out myself, bleed to death issue be damned), the Very Very Very Bad symptoms have started to lessen. But I still have some pretty drastic PMS some months. Sometimes I still get Angry. Very angry. Other months I get really super weepy.

The point is I’m choosing to blame this week’s weepiness on my ever-lovely Mood Adventures with My Mirena. David linked to this video on Facebook yesterday and I just sat here and sobbed and sobbed. If you haven’t seen it, even if you aren’t in some hormone-induced hysteria, I recommend a box of tissues handy.

On the up side of things, today it is actually warm here. I think the mercury might have passed 70! I’m no fan of heat, but this weird winter-summer was out of hand. Hopefully it will stay warm.

Yeah. The dead cat, my IUD, soldiers and the weather.

*shakes head*

Today, the three of us went out for a rare restaurant meal! We went to Val’s. If you come visit me and you are not vegetarian, we will take you to Val’s if you want. It’s very good in an old-fashioned way. They don’t take plastic payment methods, only cash, heh. Anyway, after that, Ed and Becca went home and I went to a coffee shop and wrote letters (where I can do so in peace instead of being interrupted by the chaos of them every two seconds):

See how I protect the privacy of my penpals so that my blog readers don’t stalk them or send them strange mail? If you want to write a letter to me, I would like that, and I would also protect your privacy by blurring your address when I post photos of your mail on my silly blog.

Ahem.

As I said to Annette on the back of an envelope the other day, no, I have not been sniffing the Elmer’s.

Also, I’m trying to sell a pen on ebay, something I bought a long time ago when I apparently thought such extravagance was a good idea. Everyone, please cross your fingers that there’s an enormous bidding war for my pen and that it sells for, oh, full new retail value or something.

I got some stamps in the mail today. I’m beginning to understand why people collect stamps! I am a heathen, though, and will be putting these on actual mail. I paid face value for these, btw, I’m not going crazy spending $10 on a $.03 stamp or something, heh. I don’t pick them out, either, I just get a variety and it’s always a surprise. This time I got some really interesting and groovy stamps.

Boo, dark and blurry. But triangular stamps! I love that Abe stamp. And take a bite out of crime, man.

Family planning…. just like Facebook groups, there’s a stamp for everything. Even letter carriers.

…and traffic accidents. Check out the ladies in the “armed services.” And the 100th anniversary of mail order, who knew?!

…and collective bargaining… okay then.

I’m not a philaterereror or whatever if I use the stamps instead of just save them in a book or something?

Recent outgoing mail, and one incoming.

Heh, this one was heavy and going to Europe and I was too lazy to go to the post office, so I slapped a bunch of stamps on it and off it went. It arrived safely!

From an old book about the great outdoors:

Another of my Velveteen Rabbit envelopes:

The back of that one is probably prettier than the front:

This is from an incoming letter, the stamps are all great, but look at the slinky! I love it!

I liked this article on usa.com, but I’m afraid the answer is no, there won’t be a revival.

I love writing letters and I love receiving them. I’ve had a couple of friends I write letters with erratically over the years, and that’s wonderful, but I wanted more (greedy like that, I am). So I joined The Letter Writers Alliance and The Letter Exchange and have now met some new friends to write more letters with. Waiting for the mail has taken on a whole new level of delight! It’s a fun, and interesting, way to get to know someone. At first it’s like a blind date, you know basically nothing about the other person. I hit it off immediately with one of my new penpals (*wave wave*) and we’re already like old friends, but mostly, the friendships develop more slowly. It’s cool.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to find time to sit down and write letters. I like to just write a letter all at once, but a certain someone (who might be named REBECCA) has a certain habit of TALKING TO ME, heh. Usually on Thursdays, Ed’s Saturday, I go out by myself for a few hours, to the library or a coffee shop, and write my letters then.

I’m also still completely addicted to making envelopes from whatever I find, magazine pages, old books, whatever. I have more envelopes than I can possibly use at this point. Annette says I should sell them on etsy.

Anyway. I wish more people would write letters. It’s a lovely thing, receiving a letter from a friend or loved one, and the whole act of choosing paper, and a pen, and writing down your thoughts, is so mindful, especially compared to how we all communicate electronically.

My hair looked great today (Ed calls it my rockstar hair), so I tried to take a picture with my phone, but didn’t realize it was on the stupid hipster setting, and then it was too close, so you can’t see my hair anyway. But hello everyone!

Ha, after I published this I realized there’s something about the stupid glare that makes my nose look enormous. Hahahaha!

These are outgoing letters. Yay letters!

You can’t tell from the photos, but some of these are really small, just barely the limit for regular postage. I love the little ones. It’s more challenging to choose stamps for them, though, from my growing collection of old stamps. I don’t worry about being spot-on with postage. The postal service needs all the help it can get these days, anyway, I’m always going for the cool stamp rather than the exact amount.

When you write to someone from The Letter Exchange for the first time, you have to use the forwarding service (after that, you can ditch the middle man if you want). So you send a letter to LEX, with the letter for your potential penpal inside. I used a #10 envelope for this one, so instead of a regular envelope, I just wrapped a New Yorker cover around it and stapled it shut. Whee! One of these stamps is especially awesome, heh.

Without something else in the photo for size comparison, it’s hard to tell the envelope above is quite a bit smaller than the one below.

The back side of the one above. I have a mini spirograph, which makes me happy.

I just mailed some of these in the last couple of days, some of you may find them in your mailbox soon!

There are two kind of people in my world; those who write letters and those who do not.

via » Correspondence Diversions Featured Tools Writing » Simplicity Embellished.

I saw this blog entry linked on Missive Maven today.

I love letters. Writing, receiving, letters are awesome. I am reading Good Mail Day and I love it, it’s very inspiring. I don’t envision myself as a mail artist at all, I’m much more interested in the letter itself, but it’s fun repurposing stuff into envelopes. I’m no Missive Maven (love love love her blog! LOVE her blog!), but I might start posting photos of some of my outgoing mail. Like so:

Some of my favorite envelopes were made from a battered copy of The Velveteen Rabit. I got the book from the thrift store and it was in pretty bad shape, but the illustrations made great envelopes:

Just some scrap paper, stamped and colored with crayon and pencil:

Another Velveteen Rabbit:

And another:

Isn’t this patriotic?! Is it weird the photo is actually of fireworks over Berlin?