Thursday, April 26, 2012

A Day at the Beach

Day at the Beach This is a scanned snapshot, I'm guessing 1950's although I don't know that much about vintage swimwear styles. I just love the swim suit she is wearing and the feeling of a happy couple out for a day at the beach.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Meaningful Mail

I obviously haven't been posting much. It is as if I have brain freeze when it comes to blogging. I'm not taking many photos either; same thing I guess. What I have been doing is reading lots of books, so many that maybe I should resume blogging book reviews. My local used book store provided Plainsong by Kent Haruf which I highly recommend. It has a simple plot about a group of people in a small town in Colorado but by the end of the novel I felt I knew them all. Whatever book I read, memoir, mystery, mainstream fiction or classic, one of the main attractions has to be the characters. Not that I don't love plotting, but it is the familiarity with people that I crave. I guess this isn't too surprising given that I'm a shrink. I will definitely read more of Haruf's work. The purpose of this post was more to mention my mailing hobby. The highlight of today's outgoing post is a letter to Lucas of Lucas Writes. He's responsible for the bird themed envelope and the pile of postage stamps. The envelope is an experiment of mine--I took a photo of a song sparrow singing in my yard, Photoshopped it to make it a high contrast black and white and printed it on an envelope. Turns out the hard part was positioning the image on the envelope (which wasn't a standard size for my printer). There is room for improvement but I enjoy the effect. Regarding the stamps: Lucas is collecting them for a project in Foxoboro, Massachusetts. Students at a local elementary school are collecting stamps in memory of the Holocaust. Their goal is 11 million stamps, one per victim and they already have over 800,000. Some of the stamps have been turned into art work which can be viewed at the site. Lucas shared the project on his blog and is collecting to send to them. I could send these stamps (a mere 81) directly to the project but it is more fun to send them to Lucas. His plan is to ship off a big box one of these days. So if you have a few extra minutes to clip a few stamps and send them off, it is for a good cause. Nothing fancy is required, flag stamps, non-profit stamps, you name it. Just an envelope and a stamp to mail.