First 20SB Postcard arrival!

Here it is, the first arrival from the 20SB Postcard Exchange. It’s a classic Sci-Fi card to boot, cool. I was starting to get worried that I was not going to receive any cards after I sent out all of mine.  This one came in from Catherine over at SaidtheCat. According to her card I even have something on my blog that was of interest! How great is that? She also used a pretty cool stamp, but overpaid for postage by about 45¢. Since my wife has been working on her 365 Days of Postcards project, I am fairly familiar with domestic mail rates.

Postcards and letters are what connected me with another blogger who has turned into a great friend and trusty penpal. All things considered, if any of my Poscard Exchange partners are interested in continuing to correspond by mail, I certainly would write back!

I have said this many times in letters and on this blog, but I think that sometimes we lose touch with some of the “real-ness” of people in this age of email and text messages. There is really nothing that beats the excitement of receiving mail and the thought that has to go into composing it.  Plus, handwriting is so much more personal.  And of course in a situation like this where you are anxiously awaiting the arrival of mail that you know is coming, it is so much fun.

I hope that my other post cards have found their way to their destinations. If you are interested in writing to me, use my work address as I may be moving in the near future!

Reverse of the postcard from Catherine.

Well my postcards for the 20SB postcard exchange are ready to mail (along with at least one extra). Thanks to the recent postage rate increase, the domestic cards get a healthy three stamps to get to the $0.33.  I have to go over to the post office for the international ones because the rate has gone from $0.85 to a whopping $1.10.  However, there is now a global forever stamp that I intend to pick up because these international post cards are not the only international mail I will have going out in the coming weeks.  Plus it is kind of a cool looking round stamp!

I really did fill up the fountain pen to write all the post cards, though I have to say, that was an adventure.  My refillable cartridge had worked it’s way loose so that as I filled, the whole front of the pen fell off and went for a swim in my ink bottle.  Thanks to a long handled pair of forceps I was able to extract the pen from the ink without making a huge mess of my desk or pouring out the ink.  A quick rinse and then a second attempt at filling and I was on my way to writing.  I do still have ink on my fingers though…

Postcard fronts, from the postcard excahnge

The array of postcards that I am sending out comes from a collection called “Postcards from Penguin.” They are all book covers from classic books.  I thought it was kind of appropriate to use something like that to send to bloggers. I didn’t pick any special covers, just as they came out of the box, so there is no meaning to who ends up with which cards.  They are pretty cool though.

Writing to someone you really don’t know anything about feels like a real challenge at first.  Then you realize that all your are trying to do is fill a tiny postcard, and by the time you realize that, there is no more space left to write.  I suppose I am also pretty good at filling up space with a whole lot of nothing. Maybe not nothing to some people, who knows. I did actually look at the blogs of my exchange partners to at least try to find something intelligent to say.  I am not sure that I will win any writing awards for them cards though.

Post cards, ready to mail!

So, with my postcards written and ready to mail, I shall head over to the post office today, pick up my stamps and send them on their merry way.  Hopefully that means that within a day or two they will start arriving at their destinations. The geocacher in me wishes that I had a travelbug stamp that I could track them with, but I don’t.  In any case, it will be fun to hear when they show up at their destinations!

Ok, here is a post that I have been dragging my feet on, but am finally getting out.  Probably inspired by the latest shipping art that I received this week that really took the cake.  Over the past year I have noticed a handful of people requesting and receiving what I have termed “Shipping Art.” After the past summer where one of my good friends at camp had received some pretty cool art, I started to do it myself.

What is shipping art, you ask? Basically it is a confirmation and reassurance that there really are people out there when you order things online or on the phone.  That real people actually do work on your orders.  I mean, you will never get this from companies like Amazon, but many of the smaller vendors may actually do this.  How does it work? When you place an order online, if the vendor gives you a place for order notes, I put a request for some kind of artwork on the shipping box.  Sometimes I get packages with artwork, sometimes not.

I started out asking for artwork on the orders I placed with geoswag.com. They are a local Utah manufacturer of trackable items used in geocaching.  I have purchased quite a few geocoins from them and they started to also fill my artwork requests.  Since I am collecting their “Wolf Pack” series coins, I first asked for a wolf on my package.  A few days later I received this:

Received from geoswag.com

After that I made another request to geoswag, this time for a skier on my package.  While this one was not hand drawn, it still made it on the package, so it counts.  I have to say, I love these guys, one of these days I really need to get up to their store and actually meet them!  Here is the skier:

Skier received from geoswag.com

Next up was a package from Markertek.com.  Markertek is a company that sells equipment for television and film production.  Since in theatre we often use the same or similar equipment, I go to them often for some things.  Given the focus of their business, I requested a cameraman to be drawn on my package.  Someone got very creative with this one and drew it on the computer and taped it to the package.  I like it!

A cameraman from Markertek.com

However, the latest package art I received really tops the list at the moment.  This week a placed an order for lamps from BulbTown.com. We needed a special lamp for the show we are working on at the theatre, only to later find out that the effect was cut.  However, I ordered the lamps before knowing that.  So I asked for a snowman on my box.  What did I get? At least one snowman on every side. To the shipping department at BulbTown, thank you so much, this made my week!

So, the next time that you order something online give it shot. Remember that there are real people out there and they work hard!

Today I headed to the polls to do my civic duty and vote in the presidential election. Despite the fact that I live in a state where it would truly take an act of god to change the political views of the population. Utah is a “red” state, so as a liberal mind, my voting in a liberal fashion has been compared to things like the salmon run and swimming up stream. It is unfortunate that the way our electoral system is set up, that the votes of the few of us will make little difference (since the popular vote counts for little and the electoral vote for Utah will in all inevitability go red).

So, why have I chosen to resurrect my blog now? Well, after making a post on facebook about who I didn’t vote for and why, in traditional facebook style people made assumtions about what I didn’t say and wondered why my argument was on-sided.  Why do I have to say why I WOULDN’T vote for one person AND why I WOULD vote for someone else? I am allowed to have a one sided argument.  Besides, it is generally easier to express what you don’t like about something . Also, by saying that I don’t like candidate X, that leave 3-4 other candidates that I might like, maybe I don’t want to talk about all of them!

I am not a super political person.  I am not really a political person at all. When it comes time for elections, I gather all the facts that I can, try to make heads and tails of them, then vote. I would imagine that even those people who have advanced degrees in political science get totally lost when it comes to presidential campaign time.  From there I look at the issues that seem to matter to me, and again, the ones that I understand. If you didn’t already get it from what I have said so far, I am also a liberal, conservative policy makers piss me off.

When I do things like watch the debates or listen to interviews or read the newspapers, I pick up on things like the following list of reasons why I wouldn’t want Romney & Ryan in position of ultimate power in this country (take almost verbatim from my facebook page).

Talking about politics to people who are passionate about politics is like quoting the bible, both sides can take the same words and issues and wrap them up to fit their needs and beliefs. Will our country come to an end if the “wrong” person is elected? No. Will it affect me? Possibly.

 

If my LGBT friends are denied rights, if my wife can’t get prescription contraceptives if she wants/needs, if the women I know are given job/wage equality, then yes.

 

I have lived through one of biggest recessions since the great depression and I have come out ok. At this point, our government would probably have to take us to hell in a hand basket for things to get much worse. I don’t want to see our natural resources plundered and our land destroyed to find coal and oil and gas. I don’t want to live in a country where the law could allow police to stop anyone on the street who just looks like they might be an illegal immigrant. I don’t want a president who blames our problems with assault weapons on the street on single mothers and bad parenting.

 

So, yes, you are right, I have no right to tell you who to vote for. I do have every right to say who I DIDN’T vote for, and why. For that matter I would also have every right to say who I did vote for. I just chose to do only the former. I also don’t care if my positions and views are the same as yours or not. I am resigned to the fact that I live in a state that is comprised of very conservative people, such is life. So I will join the few fishes swimming upstream and vote against the current.

So by all means start a political debate with me. Next tuesday it won’t matter either you will be stuck with someone you don’t like or didn’t vote for or I might be, or not.  Don’t debate me though if you haven’t or won’t get off your ass to do your civic duty and vote, because if you don’t, you have no right to debate!

You may have noticed today that I added a page to my blog called “Geocaching Profile” (under the about tab). You may be asking what this is.  So I figured that I should tell you.

For those who have not heard of Geocaching, it is a global GPS “treasure hunt” where people hide caches around the world and post GPS coordinates online so that other people can find them.  A “regular” cache usually is a watertight plastic container or a .30 or .50-cal ammo can.  A cache always contains some kind of logbook and trade items.  Most of the time trade items are simple things like lapel pins happy-meal type toys, and other small nick-nacks.  Some people also hide larger and smaller caches from 5-gallon buckets to tiny “nano” caches that only contain a small log sheet.

The official Geocaching website is Geocaching.com, but there are a couple other sites that have popped up like Opencaching or even Munzee, which is an odd derivative that involves using your smartphone to scan QR-codes.  Geocaching is by far the most widely used of the services.  Cachers can visit the website and get information and coordinates for the caches they want to look for, and you can even load this information on to your GPS or smartphone so that you can take it with you and not have to print things out.  The geocaching motto is “Get out and play!”

What does this have to do with me?  Well, I was introduced to geocaching by my father back when I was in college.  I did a little bit of caching with my friends while in school, and then it kind of fell by the wayside despite the fact that the old GPS unit that my dad had “loaned” me was riding around in the back of my car for years.  Then, for my birthday this year my in-laws gave me a new GPS unit that makes caching really easy, and it re-sparked the flame to go out and do it.  So, pretty much since my birthday this year I have been trying to get out every day and find at least one cache. As of this writing I have a string of 54 days with finds.  I don’t know if I will ever be able to put together a streak of finds that is longer than the 2115 days of slump, but that isn’t really the point.

What is the point? Well, it really is just to get outside and have some fun, which I certainly have been doing.  There are some challenges that cachers can complete.  Some caches require you to solve puzzles or complete challenges in order to find and log the cache.  Basically the game is based around goals that you set for yourself.  There really aren’t any big prizes, no one can win the game.  I suppose if you found all of the millions of caches around the world you could say you won, but there are new caches every day.  For me it is just something fun to do.