My desk

I said a while ago that I was trying to draw and paint more. Well here is a drawing from back in July of part of my desk.  The lamp on the left is actually much larger in person. My scale is all wrong. I have my little cat letter holder, which is always stuffed with things to reply to. A polka dot tin with ink pads inside for rubber stamps, and a jar with washi tape inside. Missing in this artistic rendition is all the crap that accumulates!

Mail of Holidays Past

I've been using my phone to take a lot of my mail photos lately, but I just used my real camera and realized I had quite a few photos on there too.
So without further ado...

Thanksgiving mail!

And when I got back from visiting family for Christmas, I had a lot of lovely mail waiting for me!

 mail, delicious mail!

Some awesome Star Wars stickers and a cool card from Tara

I love the Grinch!

Dana gave me this really cute Christmas tree card.
On the back was this sticker...

It's so perfect because her puppy's name is Olive. I think the sticker is from a book called "Olive, the other reindeer". And the photo is of Olive at her puppy school graduation! So cute!

 Not one, but two cards from Tenzin were waiting for me when I got home.

From guess who? StoneZebra of course!

A really fun envelope! I love bright envelopes! And a cool Dickens card from Becky

A horsey!! Christmas card from Alison (fellow LEP member) in South Africa.

I currently have 3 cards from Danielle that I need to respond to!

I've got a lot of writing to do! I can't wait to send everyone pink and red envelopes for Valentine's Day!

A note about Christmas cards

Hello everyone,

The Missive Maven has a posting every year about how she doesn't do Christmas cards because she is Jewish and I wanted to share my stance.

I love Christmas and I enjoy sending Christmas cards, and I have a ton because it's easy to find them for sale in thrift stores.

If I correspond with you, PLEASE forgive me if I send you a Christmas card if you don't want one. I want to respect everybody's beliefs, but I'm kind of bad at keeping things straight and I write to a lot of people. So please forgive me if you don't want me to write to you on a Christmas card. Also with a lot of my newer penpals the subject hasn't even come up yet. Feel free to comment and tell me now.

That said, I won't send you a Christmas card with just my name signed, it'll be a letter. As happy as I am that people send more mail at this time of year, I do find it a bit disappointing that many people don't write anything in their cards!

Also, I'd be thrilled to receive any kind of holiday card from you, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid, Happy New Year, or Festivus for the Rest of Us! :)

Okay, and now here are a few letters from Rusty that I don't think I've blogged yet.

Rusty Mail

So far I haven't missed a day of posting for Blogtoberfest, and even though I'm very tired tonight from finishing a school paper I didn't want to miss today.  So here's a quick photo post of a recent lovely letter from Rusty:

 I love the old stamps she used! They came off of the plastic wrapper very easily, so now I can use them in my mail art or just keep them in my collection.

Very fun and colorful exotic themed mail :-)