Egotistical Blatherings

My parents always send cute holiday cards.



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Today's user pic is a photograph of mine that I often have printed up as postcards. I think Moo does the best job printing postcards of any place I've found thus far.

Today I got a beautiful card from Finland.



It had a gorgeous stamp on it.



And the sender drew a little laughing face as part of the message.



Postcrossing just recently posted stats about the number of participants per capita by country, and Finland is #1 with 275 per 100,000. The USA is down at #32 with 13 per 100,000.

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Today's sexy user pic is a postcard from an "art film" studio. ;-)

Today's card is from Russia, but the sender noted the card was "from Spain." I really like it when I get cards from other lands than the sender is from.

"Los Torros"



And a Russian stamp with a clearer postmark than usual, which gives the reason for the sender's PS apology. She was sorry she took so long to mail the card. The card was mailed on February 18, 2013, but Postcrossing says it took 41 days to get here, because the website starts the clock when you get the address to send to. There are folks on Postcrossing who hate this sort of delay because it skews their statistics. To me, it's just another facet of the hobby. People have lives and get distracted.




My other interesting combination was a Japanese card sent from Finland. There are folks on Postcrossing who hate exactly this sort of thing and request that cards sent to them only come from the sender's country.

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The user pic in this entry is a promotional ad postcard for "Brokeback Mountain."

My mailbox is happy, meaning having something non-junk and non-bill addressed to me, more days than not. It's taken me about a year to get to this point, and I'm quite happy.

I have a fairly robust exchange on Postcrossing. I've been a member there for nearly a full year, 361 days as I write this. I have been trying to always keep my number of sent cards at the maximum. I've successfully sent 196 cards that have been logged by the recipient. I have received 183 cards, including two today. 

Today I got one of Riga in 1572, my second one from Latvia:



And this delightful one from Colorado, a card published by Hallmark, to my surprise:



At present I have 9 of 12 possible cards out there in the mail. Now that I've been in a year, I'm going to worry less about keeping my cards sent at the maximum. I have enough momentum now. It does take a couple of months to get things going consistently.

I have 10 expired postcards, cards that have been traveling for longer than 60 days. For a while, I was checking to see if the recipient was an active postcrosser and if so, I was sending a second card. That doesn't favorably increase my stats at all, but it does get someone their card. Now, however, I've drifted into a more relaxed approach; if a card gets lost, I just let it go.

I've had cards from 28 different countries. I especially enjoy the stamps and the cards from people who try to send me ugly or otherwise unwanted cards. I've asked for that in my profile, and those often turn out to be my favorite ones!

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Also, this month, every posting will have a user pic of mine that is either a postcard or card that I have sent or received over the years. Just looking through my user pics, I realize that I have a lot of them in this category. This one is from a long-gone old pack of notecards.

Sent out two cards, one to a grad school friend in Texas and one to a New Jersey penpal.

In celebration of Edward Gorey's birthday, I'm sending out three Gorey things: postcrossing postcards to Latvia and Malaysia, and a thinking-of-you card to a college friend.

Today I am sending a birthday card, a postcrossing postcard to Germany, and a penapl letter. The penpal letter is a first reply to a gentleman in Minnesota who found me via A Month Of Letters.

Today is a US Mail holiday, but I have a few things ready to go out, so I will add those for today. I have a thank-you note (again with the fleur-de-lys theme and seal) and a penpal letter in a homemade envelope.