That is so cool!
I loved it too when I was a kid, and I picked it up again recently when I registered to a website that allows you to exchange postcards with strangers. So now I get to keep not only amazing postcards from around the world, but also beautiful stamps! 
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Can you share the website?
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Sure! It’s Postcrossing.
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Used friends’ instagram posts to practice gesture drawing today. I ended up turning one of the drawings into a “painting” - did my best with “canvas pencil” and “oil painting” brush settings. Sent the portrait to her, and she really enjoyed it. That felt nice. 
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Decorated my mum and dad’s house for Christmas.
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I was never into postage stamps, but the mention of post cards reminds me of the love I had as a kid for collecting and displaying Christmas greeting cards this time of year, and even as a kid, I think I had an extra appreciation for the cards that had embossed designs, which present me would consider absolutely essential… Makes me wonder if the big boxes of Christmas cards that contain like a dozen different designs and a festively colored envelope for each in a nice gift box are still a thing or if eCards wiped the market for such things out.
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We still exchange a small number of Christmas cards each year. Mine are embossed with braille.
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I spent three hours recording my vocals in a harder rock song, so my voicebox is fried, lmao. I’m half-happy with it though, which is better than unhappy. Now I just need to record vocals for the bridge that overlap each other in a way that sounds like madness (on purpose)… Then the song’s done!
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A nice walk through my childhood home suburb.
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I tried to visit the suburb in DC where I started grade school. The cab driver refused. 
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I got another rating on Never Gives Up Her Dead! That always makes me feel excited
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Off to the local Christmas market later!
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Had a deep tissue massage and she beat the crap out of me. You know, in a good way. Then had a long soak in a very hot epsom salt bath, and it’s cold enough outside to make that appealing. All around good.
And a note on the delightfulness of Renaissance Faires:
This weekend I helped my potter friend at a Ren Faire. We don’t do those because we don’t make the right kind of things, so I didn’t really have any experience with them. Before this weekend I thought that these were all folks who were just really committed to a bit. Now I realize that it’s not a bit, not a role. These people genuinely feel that they are knights or Druids or fairies or elves or what have you, and when they go to a Ren Faire, everyone they meet treats them like that. They have shed the costume of a 21st century mortal and become their true selves, and every person there honors that. It’s lovely to see. There were people there who looked straight out of Rivendell, and it was just charming.
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Woke up late because I went to open mic night last night. It was the last Kirk organised, so that was a pretty emotional ending, haha. It was great.
I also think how much I’ve managed to fix my sleeping schedule so that now I think of 10 AM as waking up “late”, lol.
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My youngest son Donny (34 yo) attends renaissance faires every year, sometimes twice when he attends both the one in the Houston area and another near Dallas. He gets in period costume along with friends. He has a great time enjoying the events and especially the food.
I have only been a couple of times. It’s a nice experience but the long days and and lots of walking and very little sitting are difficult at 74.
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Got my nails done today. Don’t usually, but I fancied a treat.
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My father and I went to see a Tom Waits cover band. Nowhere near the real thing, but it was good. Especially towards the end of the set when they played more of Waits’ blues-rock stuff like Heartattack and Vine.
And my heart skipped a beat when the guitarist played the first fragile chords of this song:
Also positive: I finally started sketching my big map of 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery. Map and extended review forthcoming.
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I’d kill for a proper soak in a hot bath. Sadly, in addition to this trailer’s hot water heater being the kind of garbage where even at the height of summer you have to turn the water off to soap up and still run the risk of rinsing in cold water starting from a full tank, the bathtub is extra narrow and uncomfortable to sit in with my wide hips, and whoever installed the dual head shower head( the kind with both a normal shower head and a hose to a handheld shower head with no mount for the latter screwed up, putting the normal shower head on the side branch of hte little y splitter and the hose on the main branch when clearly it should be the other way around and the hose is screwed on too tight to fix it, making the stationary shower head practically worthless as it sprays into the corner instead of down or out, and loosening the y splitter to make it spray down makes it spray down so steeply that sitting unter it means getting jabbed in the back by the tub faucet…
TL;DR. Comic book guy voice Worst. Bathing. Facilities. Ever!
More to the thread, last night/early this morning, I accidentally spilled the pill jar I use to store darning and sewing needles… right between my thighs while sitting crossed legged on a foam camping mattress and wearing only some thin athletic pants and some of the sewing needles ending up under me… fortunately, I managed to clean up the tiny, sharp pieces of metal without sticking myself in the process, though my pants have a few new micro holes.
And with a negative and a neutral out of the way, a positive: After a couple of days where the temperature shot up into the 70s, it is back to actually feeling like December today. Even got to enjoy a few hours of sleep under two blankets this morning.
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My 10yo son just beat me at chess for the first time for real, without take-backsies or teaching time-outs for analysis of the position.
I blocked a harmless looking check from his queen with a defended pawn, and he pounced on it with an en-passant capture that opened a discovered check and led to my king being chased around the board by his queen and dark-squared bishop. He finished me off with a neatly placed rook.
I’m so proud!
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An unexpected afternoon off! I made some more progress on the videogame I want to finish playing before Christmas.
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