Garden news, or, How is July almost over?

The summer is flying by! I have definitely been writing lots of mail, but admittedly I have been spending more time in my garden. I can only garden in the summer, so I try to live it up and maximize my outdoor gardening time during every available moment.



The weather has been truly gorgeous, and I have had many available moments to have my hands in the dirt! Since I haven't posted in a while (again), I wanted to share with you photos of where and how I've been spending most of my time.



I am a sucker for color, and I'm all about the flowers! (Alex does the veggies, and I do the flowers. Though he does a few flowers here and there, and I do no veggies. But we have a nice little team thing going.)

I've also been posting to instagram a lot lately, so if you want to have a look at my photos there, have a look at my MissiveMaven instagram pix.



I've been writing a lot more mail but not photographing much of it, but here's a nice picture I arranged earlier in the summer.

How is your summer going? Are you having a good mail summer?

Postcards from Taiwan

I just got back from a trip to Taiwan! Of course the first thing I bought there was a big pile of postcards. These are cards in the Gotochi style, though they are from Taiwan and not Japan. They're thick and with unusual shapes all featuring local attractions or culture, done in a cartoon illustration style. I sent one to myself from Taipei on August 16, and it was waiting for me when I got my mail today! Hats off to you, Taiwan postal service. Also, holy cheap, Batman! Just about everything in Taiwan was reasonably priced or even inexpensive, coming from the USA, and the postage for this international postcard cost 11 NTD (New Taiwan Dollars). Guess how much that is in USD? As of this posting, 35 cents! Wow. I was able to send off a few postcards from Taipei, but it was mostly a work trip and I was busy most of the time, so I didn't get a whole lot of mail written or sent there. Also, mailboxes were a little hard to find in my area, so I carried a few postcards around for a number of days until I could finally mail them on Friday.

This Taiwan trip took up a lot of my mental energy this summer, preparing and planning for the trip (work trip - I did some guest teaching and gave a concert, so it was a lot more than just travel adventure!), and I guess I can offer that as an excuse for being so absent from this blog. We also spent the first couple months of the summer at our new house in Maine, which was idyllic but also busy. I did spend a lot of time actually *writing* mail instead of blogging about it, but we also did a lot of work on the house and I spent a ton of time in the gardens.



YES! I have gardens again! I'm super excited about that, though it's challenging to be away from them for weeks or months at a time. The summer days flew by, as I spent hours in the garden with my hands in the dirt.

So right now I'm in a bit of location limbo... a week in Maine, a few days in NH, a week in Taiwan, a few days in NH, nearly a week in Maine, a few days in NH, a weekend in Maine... you get the picture. (Because I'm so back-and-forth, my etsy store will remain closed for a couple more weeks.) And then summer is over and I'm back to school crazy-ness. I've had all kinds of postal adventures in addition to travel adventures, and I'll try to catch up and get them blogged as best I can, but in the meantime... I hope everyone is having a fantastic, mail-filled summer!

Good mail place

I'm settling into summer mode, and getting back into the mail groove! I don't have an actual writing desk here, but I brought a stash of stationery, stamps, and postcards, and I did a lot of Postcrossing cards at this table recently. I think this is going to be my prime mail location ... except I keep getting distracted by the view! This Midwestern gal has become entranced by mountain-watching.

Yesterday I walked the 2 miles (and back) to our new PO Box to get the mail. It was a lovely walk, and it's nice to slow life down so that I can take the time to do this. You notice so much more on foot than you do in a car, and you get a much more intimate feel for the neighborhood. Sometime soon I'll have to take some photos of this sweet little post office.

The cats are settling in nicely to our new place as well, and Oberon also enjoys the light:



And in other news, Missive Maven on Etsy has reopened, selling just postcards for the summer.

Happy Summer Mail Days!

Summer vacation: off to Maine

Here's the news I've been hinting at, and why I'm only selling postcards in my etsy shop for a while: we're heading up to Maine for the summer.

It's a quiet setting on a lake in Western Maine, near the White Mountains. (We can see them from the house, as shown in the photo!) I hope to have a lot of quiet, time, and space for practicing and mail-writing, bird-watching and swimming. It's been a crazy busy year, and I've neglected mail and many other aspects of life in order to give my best effort at grad school... but it's time for a break! We *do* have internet, so I should be able to blog and do Posctrossing and all my other favorite internet-based mail activities... but one of the things to which I'm looking most forward is writing letters while gazing at those mountains, and hearing the birds chirp.

Our mail will be forwarded, and we have a PO box in town. Speaking of that... we'll be in a very small town, not a populous area... and they know me at the PO already! It's a wonderful little post office and I predict some fun stories will come from my mail adventures there.

We're in the process of moving up there now (and taking the cats! Big changes for them!), so I may be laying low for a few days, but there are great things on the horizon.

What about you, blog readers? What do you do in the summertime, and do your mail habits change in the summer?