Dreaming of Postcards!

Anyone who’s been following along with my blog for very long, knows I have a bit of an obsession with postcards. I’ve always loved sending and receiving them—even when I was a child. Then, about 10 years ago, I discovered a postcard exchange website (called Postcrossing) that I decided would be perfect for our homeschooling geography studies. That’s when I really got obsessed. Suddenly I wasn’t limited to only friends and family who’d occasionally think of sending me a postcard when they went somewhere cool. I joined a community of bonafide snail mail lovers who enjoyed sending and receiving postcards as much as I did! I was hooked!

We used it as part of our homeschool geography for a few years, but the kids never got as into it as I did. Somewhere along the way, I embraced it fully as my hobby and haven’t looked back.

Now, my family knows that I will spend a part of every trip we go on, not only looking for postcards, but also places to buy postage and mailboxes to send them from. In the US, finding decent postcards is the hardest part. Usually I can find some in some quirky souvenir shop, but not always. I bring postage with me and just drop them off in the local post office. It’s usually easier to find postcards in foreign countries, but much harder to procure the correct postage and find places to send them from. I try to send postcards to family and friends from every stop on our journeys.

At home, it’s a different story. When life is calm, I generally send 5-10 postcards a week to people on postcrossing ( the postcard exchange website). Just for fun. I sign up for how many postcards I want to send, then get assigned that number of names/addresses. I look at their profiles and pick a postcard I think will suit them. When my postcard is received, the recipient registers the card, and my name/address gets thrown into the mix. So I receive postcards from different people than I send them to. I’m sure the mail deliverer is entertained by the stacks of postcards I sometimes have waiting for me in my mailbox!

Have I ever shown you my postcard files? No? Well, here they are in the drawers of my coffee table...

I've got them organized alphabetically  by subject and can usually find what I'm looking for pretty quickly.   You’d be surprised at the eclectic postcard tastes of some people on the postcrossing website, so my collection is also quite eclectic.  From animals, to insects, to national parks, to books, to food, to weather, to vehicles, to bridges….it is a rare thing for people to stump me with their requests! 

I also have this bin of random postcards --mostly from other countries --that don't quite fit into my other categories.   This bin is  a bit more disorganized, but it definitely has some treasures in there too! 

Then there's my collection of received postcards, which is admittedly a little lame and not worth showing here on the blog.  This may be heresy to some postcard collectors, but I actually weed out my received postcards pretty regularly and just keep my favorites.  

Here is a sampling of my favorite kind of postcard to receive….

On my postcrossing profile, I call them artistic touristy cards and they make me very happy.  They’re also my favorite kind to find when I’m traveling and I’ve been known to walk down touristy streets peeking into souvenir shop after souvenir shop looking for the “right” kind of postcard.  Yes, I married a patient man!  Haha!  

 I also love these Inge Löök Old Lady postcards that make me laugh every time! 

This past week, I was very excited to start receiving a slew of texts from family and friends saying that the last batch of postcards from our Middle East trip were starting to arrive!  It took 2-1/2 months, but they made it! 

And in other exciting postcard news…

CHECK IT OUT!!!! 

I got a postcard FROM FREAKING ANTARCTICA from a friend and I couldn’t be more excited!   😆

Need a boost and want me to add you to my postcard list?! Send me an email or text, and I’ll get you added! 💌 

My Social Life

On an introversion - extroversion scale, I find myself right in the middle leaning a little towards the introverted side.   I definitely like attending social events, as long as I don't have to plan them (and as long as they're not too big)!   The problem with not enjoying planning, though, is that it puts me at the mercy of my friends, who are also mostly introverted and don't love planning things.   And it doesn't help matters that I married someone with even lower social needs than my own, which means I often have inertia working against me as well.   In other words, I like being social and usually am quick to accept when invited to one, but most of the time my social life is a little less active than I'd prefer.   My ideal social life would involve a mix of small group social events with the occasional large one...all planned by other people, of course!  

Do I think you all really care that much about my social life?  Probably not.   But I do want to capture a few social events I've recently been a part of and make sure I don't forget them!  
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Postcrossing meet-up:  You all likely know that I am a complete postcard geek!  I love hunting for them,  collecting them,  and sending them.  I generally send 10-15 per week and that's when I'm at home.  When I'm traveling, it's even more.   Mostly I find that this hobby is viewed as a little "out-there" by most people, but I AM NOT ALONE!    Back in September, a bunch of us Utah based postcard aficionados met at a library in Salt Lake City and talked postcards for two hours!   It was fun to be surrounded others who share the same interest and I very much enjoyed the chance to just gather with some like-minded people.  

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Lunch with postcard friends:  In addition to the Postcrossing meet-up in September, I also recently had lunch with a couple other local postcard loving friends I've met through the community.   Kelly and Alison both live within about 20 minutes of me and are about as geeky as I am.  We even have an ongoing "ugly alphabet" postcard exchange between us, where we take turns sending ugly postcards to each other in alphabetical order.   I have no pictures from the actual lunch, but here's a shot of the most   recent postcard I sent out in our ugly alphabet exchange.  We are on our second round through and I got the letter D this time.  💩

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Virginia Gatherings:  There are times when I feel like I'll never really have good deep friends here in Utah like I did in Virginia, but I sure am grateful for my friends from Virginia.   We've had a few gatherings recently that have meant the world to me.  A few of us (Linda N., Heather P., Karen H) met for breakfast a few weeks ago.  I also loved that the Palmers recently moving here meant that some get-togethers happened amongst Vienna Warders that might not have happened otherwise.  We met at the park a couple times and just enjoyed catching up with old friends.   Since we had a pit-stop in Pennsylvania between Vienna and Utah, I think some people forgot that this is where we landed, so it's good to have some Virginia friends close-by to add a little pull!   I also met with a friend (Christina) recently who was here babysitting her grandkids.  I enjoyed catching up with her and getting to know the cuties that are the kids of one of Spence's best friends. 

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Book group:  It's been a while since I mentioned my book group, but this is my one exception I have about not planning things.  I LOVE my book group discussions and people so much, that it's worth it for me to overcome my dislike of planning social things, and just making it happen!  I wish I took more pictures of these awesome ladies, but book group is something that keeps me sane.  I host every month AND make the refreshments every month, since that's what made it more likely for people to come.  Tonight we will discuss,"The Last Days of Night" by Graham Moore and I am making Lona's famous popcorn from my PA book group.  I made it last time and generated some excitement with it, so I'm sticking with what works!   

Other upcoming reads include:
Jan:  "Becoming Beatrix:  The Life of Beatrix Potter and the World of Peter Rabbit " by Amy O'Quinn
Feb:  "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" by Rachel Joyce
Mar:  "The Personal Librarian" by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
Apr:  "A Long Way from Chicago" by Richard Peck
May: "Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution" by Michelle Moran

Have I mentioned how much book group means to me?   I love it.  

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I can't do a post about being social and not  mention the Relief Society activities, which I've been planning for the last 2-1/2 years, but rarely post about. They've been taking up a lot of my social bandwidth and I'm hoping to stretch myself more in my personal life now that I have a new calling.  We shall see! 
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So there you have it--proof that I have friends and I like being social.   😇

Give me a call next time you come to town!  

Another Thanksgiving in the Books!

I feel like I've been a little off my game with blogging lately and I'm here today to try to get caught up a bit by {finally} blogging about Thanksgiving.   What about the trip we took back in September, you ask?  Well, blogging about that, my friends, is going to have to wait for another day.  Maybe another year.  My bandwidth is not quite there for diving into trip photos yet.   

So, I'll start off the rundown on Thanksgiving with our Christmas decorations.      I've been feeling a lot more minimalistic this year and we didn't even put half of the ornaments on the tree this year.  I originally thought we might get a narrow tree for the dining room to display some of the other ornaments, but ultimately we left it more sparse.   Maybe we'll find a tree on clearance at the end of the season.    

I also tried to go a little lighter on decorating the display shelves.    It's probably still too much and it's definitely way too much brown on brown, but until I finally get around to painting these shelves, it is what it is.  It usually takes 5+ years of an item being on my home improvement to-do list before I even think about making it actually happen. Someday...perhaps!     

IN Virginia, we almost always hosted Thanksgiving at our house, but we haven't done it much since moving here to Utah, since my Mom was already filling that role when we arrived.  {Click here to see a glimpse of  past Thanksgivings}. It's been nice to just show up as a guest the past few years.   This year, however, my Mom and sister needed a break and we became the host house!   With all the hosting we've done with the YSAs the last few months, it didn't feel as stressful as it might have otherwise.   We had 2 of our 5 kids there {Spence and Adam}, my Mom, my sister, two aunts, one uncle, three cousins, the mother-in-law of my cousin, and four kids of my cousin.   We assumed we'd have some of our YSA ward members join the crew, but everyone we talked to already had plans, and the 1st counselor beat us to the punch with the two that didn't.    That was right about 20 people...just enough to keep things lively, but without it being that stressful.   

Glen  smoked the turkey, made mashed potatoes, and gravy.  Adam and I made the pies, which turned out dog ugly, but tasted pretty good anyway!    I need to keep working on my gluten free pie crusts!   

The rest of the Thanksgiving dinner was made by everyone else, which is an awesome way to do things. We played one round of Codenames and then I gave everyone a postcard challenge.   Everyone picked a random word and I went through my postcard stash after they left and sent them a postcard with that word on it.  No one stumped me, though a few people got close (all with food words).   

 In the end I actually found postcards with a pretzel....

pasta...

 and another with a taco on it...  

The words they gave me (besides taco, pasta, and pretzel) were iridescent, watermelon, tiger, purple, lake, candy, beach, pig, octopus, and heat.  And none of the rest of them were that hard.  

 Haha!   Yes, I'm aware that I'm quite a nerd when it comes to postcards.    Feel free to leave a comment and challenge me with your own word.  😆

Now, back to more Thanksgiving shenanigans. 

The boys also played a lot of Magic the Gathering...

And I was quite enraptured with the pics from Thanksgiving out East!   I really missed having any of our girls home and I am somewhat obsessed with Oliver and Lucie right now.  I really really need to see them again soon.   Isn't that flannel on Oliver the cutest?!   

 Adam gave a talk the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so I skipped out on part of 2nd hour and went to watch.   He spoke about becoming new creatures through Christ and did a great job! 

Last but not least, we did a peppermint ice cream taste test over Thanksgiving week.   

Last year, we did Tillamook vs. Umpqua and declared Umpqua the winner.   

This year we put BYU Creamery and Farr's peppermint up against Umpqua....

And Umpqua won the day again!  

 It's got a great creamy texture and by far the best peppermint flavor.    We'll look for more brands to test next year and see if any can unseat Umpqua!   

 

All in all, it was a great long weekend with my boys and it was nice not to have much on our schedule.  I've got a lot to be thankful for and you, my dear blog readers, are on that list!  Thanks for tuning in and have a beautiful holiday season filled with  peace and lots of love.  

All in One Weird Week

Life has been a little weird lately and I'm tired.    

No, I didn't say I'm weird,  though some would argue that that's also a true statement.   I'm referring to the fact that in amidst our normal busy life stuff, there has been a whole lot of really weird stuff making life even busier than usual and maxing out my mental bandwidth!     This blogpost shows a glimpse at one single week.  

Let's take a look at the somewhat normal stuff first.   

 It started off with dinner for the masses.  Yes, somehow hosting dinner for big groups has become a normal thing in our lives.   Glen smoked brisket and we had a ton of food:  

We had a decent turnout of people (about 30 all together)...

We love having our ward members in our home and feeding them home-cooked food...

And the food was definitely a hit, though I made too much corn and too many lemon bars...

I did a postcard challenge with some of them (everyone in this picture) and that was fun.  What is a postcard challenge, you ask?   It's when I challenge them to give me a word/theme and I go through my stash and send it to them in the mail.  It's a really fun way to share my postcards with them and to challenge myself to dig into the depths of my postcard stash.  Some words that challenged me this round were rutabaga, carrots, and garnishment.   

We have an awesome ward!   

It's been a very warm and dry winter overall, but we've had a little more rain lately.   One of the days we went on a wet walk...

This is what I looked like after...

I found these  cute photos taken by Emma in the camera roll that made me smile...

I hosted book group one night, then went to see Bella M. perform in Romeo and Juliet in the BYU ballet the next night, then went to a Valentine's dinner with a bunch of Kristina's friends that have relocated to Utah.   I do have to say that talking about books, seeing old friends at the ballet, and hanging out with new friends was all good for my psyche with all the other weird stuff going on.   I made these heart-shaped O-Henry bars for the Valentines dinner, then served the rest at our family dinner the next night.  

 

The sister of one of our ward members came to town for the long weekend.  After talking with her, we learned that she had just returned from serving in Ellie's mission.  What did I do?   I started blubbering and crying, because she'd seen our missionary more recently than me, which made me extra excited for June.  I am not a big crier, but I've been missing our missionary extra ever since she went past the year mark in December!  

Here's a glimpse at the Sunday dinner that week...we had burger bowls, which were extremely delicious and enjoyed by all at our full table!   This is where we enjoyed the rest of the heart shaped O-Henry bars.  

So that's mostly all the normal stuff. 

Let's get on to the weird stuff (definitely no pictures of this craziness).

1.  I have somehow become the assistant for helping an elderly relative evict an adverse tenant who has overstayed his welcome.   It's been a LONG, exhausting process which involves talking to attorneys, calling the suicide hotline multiple times, and trying to protect my relative from being taken advantage of.  We are going to great lengths to try to do this in a way that's a win-win for everyone, but it's hard when one of the parties is not a reasonable person.   I am ready for this process to be over.  

2. I left a negative review for a place on Google and the owner PICKED A FIGHT with me!    It was actually pretty bad and we ended up deleting our review, because we are chickens and they totally called us out by name.  We did absolutely nothing wrong, but they said a lot of inflammatory, gaslighting, threatening things (something we noticed they do with all of their negative reviews).  I still get very angry about it every time I think about it, and I really wanted to leave it up, because we did nothing wrong, but Glen was concerned because his name got dragged into the whole thing.  Seriously evil.   Please let me know if you ever want to go to a therapist office in Provo and I would love to tell you which one to run the other way from.  The way they attack any critique on them whatsoever tells you all you need to know about the way they do business and does not reflect well on a business that has to do with mental health.  We deal with a lot of  therapist offices with Glen's calling and every single interaction we had with them was an exercise in extreme frustration.   The owner of this office is clearly not mentally well himself, because mentally well people do not treat other people {even those that disagree with the way they do things} the way that he does.     I  started listening to "Let it Go" on repeat and did some hard exercises trying to burn off some negative energy and get my brain to a more positive place. 🙄

 <deep breath>  

And lest you think that's all of the weird stuff...it's not. That's just all that happened in that one week. I'll blog more about the rest of it later, but the weirdness definitely did not subside after that week was over. Some things to look forward to in  upcoming blogposts: an out of town funeral, a serious injury on the way home from said funeral, an apocalyptic snowstorm for some of my kids, an unexpected trip, and a sacrament talk ...plus more eviction drama.   yay.



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A Quick Pit-stop on the Mainland: Belgium and Luxembourg

I'm aware that this blogpost will expose me as the travel nerds we are, but you probably already knew that to a certain extent, so I'm going for it.  So far I've blogged about  Scotland (the first leg of our trip),  Northern Ireland (the third leg of our trip), and  Ireland (the fourth and final leg),  but we had a pitstop in Belgium/Luxembourg between Scotland and Northern Ireland.  Why?  Because  Glen had never been to either one of them and we thought we'd take advantage while we were in the "vicinity".  Of course, the term vicinity is being used lightly here since they were a plane ride away, but relatively speaking we were much closer to Belgium/Luxembourg than we normally are and inter-Europe flights on RyanAir can be found for  cheap.  

So we went for it.  

It was a pretty quick trip, because we didn't want to short-change the British Isles, but we ended up really enjoying this fun little foray into mainland Europe for a few days.  In fact, if you ask Glen what his favorite part of the trip was, he'll likely tell you that he loved all the places we visited, but Belgium was his favorite.  And we both agree that it definitely had the best food and that's not even close!

We arrived into the Brussels Charleroi Airport (the small airport RyanAir flies into) and immediately jumped on a bus to Ghent.   We chose Ghent, because we had time for one city and it had been one of our favorite stops when I took the kids to Belgium in 2019. 

We figured since we were only spending 2 nights in Belgium, that we should get a hotel as centrally located as possible.   The Ghent Marriott (right where my finger is pointing ) is located right on the canal and was ideal for exploring the city! 

We were very excited to locate a Belgian waffle place nearby THAT HAD GLUTEN FREE WAFFLES TOO!   I  might have been a bit giddy about that and we definitely stopped there a couple times!  They even had gluten free speculoos topping for it that made me extra happy.

I was excited to introduce Glen to the Ghent "noses" that we discovered on our last trip here.   They're a locally made gummy candy that resemble a nose shape, hence the name.   

They're decently good (especially when fresh), but, frankly, I was more excited by other Belgian foodie finds.  We ate well on this leg of our trip!   

Since we only had a short time in Belgium, we debated about the most effective way to see the sites.  Ghent is a fairly compact city, but we'd walk by things, and think, "Wow, that's beautiful," then not really know anything else about it.  

What we ended up doing is buying a Scavenger Hunt off of Trip Adviser, which was a perfect way to see the city.  It took us to all the big sites (and some smaller ones), would give us information about them when we arrived, and even had games/challenges we could try.

I liked that we could go at our own speed, taking time to go inside those places that interested us.  We definitely saw a lot more of the city than we would have just by wandering. 

I was flooded with nostalgia when the scavenger hunt brought us to this alley filled with graffiti.   I had totally forgotten that this was in Ghent and we have several pictures of Ellie and Adam here from 2019.   I actually love when cities provide graffiti zones where local artists can showcase their talents. 

Between the food, the gorgeous architecture, and the walkability of Ghent, we were pretty enamored.   

We were a little reluctant to leave here after just two days, but it was time for one last adventure on the mainland before heading back to the Isles.  

Early the next morning, we packed up our luggage and hopped on a train for Luxembourg.  

It was about a 4-hour train ride, but the scenery between Ghent and Luxembourg City was stunning...especially the closer to Luxembourg we got.  It was hard to take pictures on a moving train, but here was one that actually turned out okay. 

  

We only had about 24 hours in Luxembourg City, so we logged A LOT of miles trying to see as much as humanly possible in that 24 hours.  

Luxembourg City was definitely the least touristy of the cities we visited, which meant finding postcards was harder than even usual.    It's like sending snail mail is a dying art or something. 😆 I never did find very pretty postcards there, but I laughed A LOT when we came across this one...

I've shopped for postcards in a lot of different places before and had never seen that kind of humor expressed on a postcard before.  The only thing I could figure was that at some point maybe some postcard manufacturer got Luxembourg mixed up with Luxor, Egypt and they just decided to go with it and make into a joke postcard.   My kids were VERY confused when they got theirs and originally thought they were delayed postcards from our trip to Egypt in 2023 (which I still haven't blogged about)!  

Food was also a bit of a disappointment in Luxembourg, but luckily we had been well-fed in Belgium, so it was all good. 
 
Luxembourg City is built into deep gorges formed by two rivers, which means that it's really a multi-level city.

We found a glass elevator that would take us between the upper and lower parts of the city without exhausting ourselves!   

This was taken at one of the biggest attractions in the city...Bock Casemates and the view from there was pretty spectacular. 

In fact, we found ourselves in awe of the amazing view quite a lot while walking around the city. 

And I'd say that at least 50% of the photos we took in Luxembourg were of gorgeous overlooks like this one...

We were also  excited to run into missionaries in the short time we were there.  They were out with friends doing a running club and asked us to take a few photos for them.   We hadn't even noticed there missionaries among them when they first approached us to take their photo, but they were so cute when we all realized.   I think their friends were as excited to meet Mormons "in the wild" as the missionaries were!  It certainly made our day, especially since the last time I'd been in Luxembourg was when I was 14 and we stopped to visit my cousin, Scott, who was serving his mission there in 1987, so it seemed only fitting to see missionaries here again, nearly 40 years later! 

We very much enjoyed our time in both Belgium and Luxembourg...

But before we knew it, it was time to head back to the British Isles....Luxembourg to Belfast, then Dublin, then home...

And now, the trip blogposts are done, and I'm back to real life!

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