Snow day = mail day

Today we have yet another snow day here in Washington, DC. It's predicted to be a lot of snow, even by DC's very low standards (I will refrain from going on about how this city cannot handle snow), and I am enjoying yet another snow day at home. It's going to be kittens and mail, all day long!



And of course, snow-watching.

Happy New Year, in a Russian winter postcard

What better way to say "Happy New Year" than with a postcard?

This lovely Russian postcard, Postcard RU-3269709, (the text reads "Happy New Year" in Russian) came to me via Postcrossing. It's a vintage reprint complete with a lovely ornate design on the back, and something about the snow-covered cottage by a lake really speaks to me. I feel the cozy, inward-turning of wintertime, but the yellow sunrise in the sky lights the promise of a new year. Hmm... am I feeling a little extra poetic-romantic today? Perhaps, but I wish all my blog readers a very Happy New Year as we move into 2015. An added bonus was the very sweet message on this card: it was the sender's first Postcrossing card, and she was quite excited about it. I am honored to be the recipient of her first card! She is sure to be an enthusiastic Postcrosser, and of course enthusiasm brings the most fun.



I've had some great Postcrossing adventures lately, with some wonderful cards received; above is one of my favorites, DE-3782357 from Germany, with a vintage illustration from 1890 of cats on a train. I don't know why this one delights me so much, but it does. Maybe because I like cats and trains both, and the cats on this train look so very civilized and serious, while also looking utterly ridiculous. (The cat illustrations from the late 1800s often share these traits.)

I also get a kick out of the fact that both these postcards I'm featuring today are vintage reproductions. Those seem to be very popular these days - and I certainly enjoy them myself!

Blizzard Nemo update

I bet many of my blog readers have heard about the huge blizzard, dubbed "Nemo," that just hit New England. Thanks to all of you who have expressed concern. We are fine, but we are shoveling ourselves out of a lot of snow. I haven't yet found an official statistic for how much snow we've received here in Newport, RI -- the snow only stopped falling a few hours ago, after over 36 hours of continuous snowfall -- but I can tell you from my own exhaustive shoveling efforts that it is somewhere between two and three FEET of snow. That is an incredible amount for coastal New England! In my neighborhood, we lost power for 23 hours, which is more than uncomfortable in 20-degree weather... it's downright dangerous. I cranked the heat in my house before the power went, because I expected to lost electricity, and when we lost power at 10pm last night, it was 71 degrees in my house. When we regained power at 9pm tonight, it was 47 degrees in my house. I was reading with hat, coat, and gloves on - by the fire in our fireplace - when the joyous beeps of appliances restarting on the electric grid resounded throughout our quiet house.

We've lost power for longer during hurricanes, recently during Hurricane Sandy, but I've not lost power at this very cold time of year before. I was starting to really worry about my elderly cats. Fortunately there was PLENTY OF SNOW to stuff inside the coolers that we employed to try to save the food from our powerless refrigerator! We were very lucky and didn't lose any food, and also didn't sustain any damage to our house, though two very large trees in our yard have come down from the weight of the snow. Don't know which was louder last night, the crack of a tree trunk breaking, or the horrible noise of a transformer blowing out when the whole few blocks lost power!

I hope the scariness of the storm is behind us. I wrote a few nice letters yesterday when the snowfall was just pretty, and the power hadn't gone out yet. As I noted in a tweet on my Twitter stream yesterday, I love to write letters in snowfall, but once we lose power, I get too nervous to write letters, and have trouble doing anything but reading. So it's been a very nervous day, and I'm beyond relieved to be back on the grid, with my furnace pumping heat into the cold house again, and hope to be able to relax into some more letters tomorrow.

I took a few snow photos today, and maybe when I have more energy and less anxiety tomorrow, I'll post some of 'em. First I've got to finish shoveling, and dig out my car.

I hope everyone in Blizzard Nemo's path is warm and safe, and happily writing letters instead of worrying about heat and electricity!

Show and mail? Snow and mail!

Last spring some folks at the National Postal Museum started a groovy Twitter hashtag, #showandmail. The concept was similar to "show and tell:" show us what you've mailed! I love seeing photos of mail, and it was a fun way to see quickly what other folks were sending and receiving. (Especially cool for those who don't have a mail blog to be able to share an instantaneous photo.) I did a blog post about it back in April when I first got into it, and all my posts that I subsequently tweeted about are tagged with #showandmail here on my blog. It was really hot Twitter hashtag for a while, but it's sort of died off lately.

The Letter Writers Alliance did a nice post recently about Show and Mail, with the intent of reviving that hashtag and mail show-and-tell. For an explanation, the LWA Management articulated it better than I could:

Why should we do this? Well, firstly, it will get us to write more letters. Secondly, it will inspire others to write more mail. Whenever I see a show and mail I get an itch to write someone. Why not spread that feeling to others?

I've been writing mail today, and our long-awaited snowstorm has finally arrived... so I thought I'd contribute a Show and Mail in the form of Snow and Mail. (Yes, I love puns, and I'm not ashamed.)



Of course, Soda had to help.

The lovely Keep Calm and Send Postcards postcard is from MaxAndCoPost on etsy, and they have some other fine mail-related postcards in their shop. It's a great sentiment for any day, but especially a day like today when many of us on the east coast are getting quite a good bit of snow.



Soda and I intend to snuggle up and enjoy it.

Whatever your weather, if you're writing mail, pop a photo up on Twitter and use that great #showandmail hashtag, so we postal voyeurs can enjoy and be inspired. And thanks to the Letter Writers Alliance for the reminder!

On blizzards and mail delivery

My husband and I were among the lucky few travelers who were able to reach our destination (home!) on Sunday, December 26. Our flight from the midwest landed in Baltimore late morning, just before the snow started, but when panic had already set in. Our flight to Providence from Baltimore was the last Providence-bound flight that left that day. (All subsequent Providence-bound flights were canceled, which made our flight a standby zoo. We were so glad to have our seats on that early flight!) We later learned that our flight was one of the last to leave Baltimore (at noon!) and possibly the very last one to touch down in Providence around 1pm.

So we drove home to Newport in a lovely blizzard (all was safe), only to learn that the main bridge onto our island (yes, Newport is on an island) closed later that night due to high winds. The Pell Bridge doesn't close very often! But hey, the NJ turnpike doesn't close very often, either, and it closed that night.

It was still snowing Monday morning, but lightly. This is New England. We are used to snow. So what if there's a foot of it? Roads were plowed, life seemed fairly normal. But when I went to pick up my mail at our local UPS store, I got only one package. What? On a Monday? After Christmas? One package and NO personal mail? Apparently local trucks were delivering, so that package must have made it to the Newport sorting station before Dec. 25. The pros at my UPS store told me that local mail trucks were on the road, but the trucks from Providence didn't make it down to us. (Rhode Island is the tiniest state, as many of you know... mail for the entire state is sorted in our capital city of Providence.)

But here's the kicker: UPS trucks weren't even on the roads that day! I have that from an official UPS employee. Goodness! Our own underdog postal service is more intrepid than UPS! Who knew?

Though the apocryphal post office creed, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," clearly doesn't hold when getting mail from Providence to Newport, they at least moved the mail around on the island. Yay U.S. Postal Service!

Anyone else have any fun blizzard-related mail delivery stories?