CWarner

I am a travel professional in Colorado who does not get to travel near as much as I'd like. Been married 30 years and have two terrific sons (yes, I'm the Mom to the Warner Brothers!). I collect bells and almost anything related to nuns and the 1960s TV show that Sally Field stared in, The Flying Nun (I have a shrine in the basement and I blame eBay for it!). My favorite color is purple, and I love moose too. When I was a kid I was going to grow up and marry Rod Taylor. When I was a teenager I was going to grow up and marry Rod Stewart. I went to work for an airline when I was 19 and traveled all over thinking I'd meet Mr. Right in some far away place. So who did I end up marrying? The boy next door! (Alas, his name is NOT Rod!)

Update as of Oct. 2011 -- I'm a Military Mom! Both my sons have signed up to serve their country. My older boy Dan will be in the Colorado National Guard as an MP. (My Grandfather was a Colonel in the CONG!) And my younger boy has joined the U.S. Army Reserves and will be a Signals Analyst in Intelligence based at NORAD/Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, CO. (My Dad was in the OSS during WWII which later became the CIA and he worked as a code breaker!) They are both off to Basic Training in Missouri this month. My husband and I are very proud, but worried that we'll be 'empty nesters' before the end of the month!

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. One of the best books ever written. The John Ford 1941 movie based on the book won the academy award for Best Picture that year, but the book is really much better-reads like Welsh poetry! (And honest to God if you do read it you'll know where they got the idea for Yoda from Star Wars to speak the way he does!)I also read many history books and biographies and although for the most part I find fiction a waste of time, I do enjoy Andrew Greeley novels, particularly his "Irish" series. I just got a Kindle Fire (love it!) and am reading a very good book that many people have told me over the years that I would love--Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. At over 1,000 pages I was always very intimidated to start it, but with the Kindle I'm not carrying around such a heavy book. I'm about a fifth of the way through and do really like it. Once I'm done with the book, I'm going to try to watch the 2010 mini-series based on it (always better to read the book first, don't you think?).

Movies based on Jane Austin books--Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Predjudice. I liked The Da Vinci Code a lot and just loved Angels and Demons even though I haven't read Dan Brown's books. Also love an oldy called The Miracle of the Bells-stared Fred MacMurray and a very young Frank Sinatra as a Catholic priest. Anything with Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Rod Taylor (The Birds and the original Time Machine) I love too. In the Sci-Fi genre, I like the Star Trek but don't care for Star Wars. The King's Speech is a newer favorite--Collin Firth and Geoffrey Rush were fabulous in that!

I'm trying to watch less TV, but ones I like quite a bit are: Downton Abbey, Antiques Roadshow, Nashville, The Mentalist, The Good Wife, CSI, Big Bang Theory, Blue Bloods and SMASH.

Cross stitch projects that take from a week to a full year. I stitch while I watch TV--less guilt about it if I'm doing something else at the same time! I've done needlepoint, bargello, and rug hooking too. I'm new to envelope making, and think it's quite nifty too!

I live, eat, and breath my departed ancestors and go to cemeteries for FUN! I have Swedish, English, Irish, Welsh, and German Bohemian ancestry. Something that's quite unusual on my Dad's side of my family is that his Dad was 48 years old when he was born (Dad did have five older sisters). My Dad married late in life and was 48 years old when I was born too. So although I was born in 1960, my grandfather, just two generations distant, was born in 1864 when Abraham Lincoln was President! In most families, that would be four generations spread over almost 100 years. Sometimes it was hard, however. Like when my Dad took me to the father/daughter tea in elementary school--all my friends asked my why my Grandfather brought me instead of my Dad!

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but I like a lot of varying types of music too. For Christmas 2009 my husband got me a turntable to play all the 33 1/3 albums I've had stashed in a corner of the basement for years. I'm now going thru and listening to over 100 rock albums from the 70s and 80s. My sons (the Warner Bros., aged 21 & 23) are fascinated with vinyl records! They are astounded that they sound as good as they do and no longer think digital has to be much better than anything else. Rock on! The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Rod Stewart, Foreigner, Boston, REO Speedwagon, Styx, Fleetwood Mac, The Who, AC/DC, etc. How fun is that?!

I've been into deltiology (collecting postcards!) for many years-since I was a teenager on a study trip in Europe and even earlier. When I was a kid growing up in the 60's, my Dad worked in the Dead Letter Office for the U.S. Postal Service. Postcards most often don't have return addresses on them, so he'd bring them home sometimes if they were found to be undeliverable and if he thought they looked interesting. Some of my favorite ones of that era were 3-D cards-- one of an astronaut on the moon, and one of Snow White and the Seven Dwarf's! I also have a good deal of very old p.c's that were mailed to family members over 100 years ago-those are true keepers! One of those was from my Grandfather to my Dad, mailed from Tenn. to Colorado Springs, CO. On the front, there is a drawing of two gentlemen walking along side a tall building. To the men, the building seems to be moving-well, it's because they're very drunk! On the back, my Grandfather wrote, "Billy, you must NEVER come home like this!". Grandfather was quite the tea-totaler, that's for sure. Another was post marked from the top of Pike's Peak and sent by my Grandmother (who died in 1917!) to her brother. I have bought p.c.'s on eBay (many of places my ancestors lived in), and when I've booked a trip for someone going to a place I don't think I'll ever make it to myself, I'll ask them to bring me back a card or two (booking newspaper reporters to the Middle East is how I've gotten cards from Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, and several other countries). I have four boxes full of postcards, one full of ones just from my home state of Colorado, two full of the rest of the USA, and one full of ones from other countries of the world. I have to admit that I'm not really thrilled about ad cards. Sending cards to me naked (no envelope) is great as I think it gives the card character (as long as the post office doesn't mangle it going thru their machines). When a swap calls for sending in an envelope or if when it's for a multiple card swap, however, please go ahead and use the envie! Really I'm very easy to please I think!

I like postage stamps quite a bit but have learned that the walk-in U.S. Post Office is NOT the place to buy them! My local P.O. never seems to have much in the way of stamps. I recently wanted a page of 28 cent U.S. postcard stamps and all they had to sell me was a roll of 100 of them! (When I told the guy I didn't want that many because the price of them is going up soon, he wasn't even aware of that!) Other times they've told me they were out of very common types of stamps. I looked around, and asked the guy, "This IS the Post Office, right?!" I've taken to ordering what I want/need thru their webite (usps.com) and find a lot of really cool stamps that way. They've put me on their mailing list for the USPS stamp collecting magazine (USA Philatelic) that comes out quarterly too. Lots of cool new U.S. stamps coming out in 2012! If you're sending a pc or an envelope to me snail mail and can use interesting stamps on it, I'd really appreciate it! I'm too cheap to keep many unused--I send out what I buy to others.

A couple of the things I'm working on to finish collecting with regard to postcards are State Capitol cards and Map cards. Wanna private swap for Colorado? Or, I have some State Capitol Cards available for trade; Annapolis, MD (2), Augusta, ME (1), Columbia, SC (2), and Atlanta, GA (1). Please contact me!

These remaining U.S. State Capitol cards I have one of, but they're very old (linen style of the 40's mostly). Would like to get a new card of the State Capitol of the following states: Delaware, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Vermont.

For U.S. State Map Cards, as of July 2010, I have them all! But I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting ones too.

I'm working on getting a lot of lighthouse cards. Living in land-locked Colorado makes this tough, but if you have one and get me for a sender's choice pc swap, please consider sending me that one!

I'm also interested in U.S. President cards--not so much cards of the men themselves, but of their burial places/graves, homes, and museums/libraries.

Other cards that would make me very happy --UNESCO World Heritage sites, Olympics (any year, Summer or Winter) Royalty, Rock and Roll Bands/Artists, Sporting events like Super Bowl, FIFA World Cup, etc. But I'm really not picky--I love city views, landscapes, nature, pretty much everything!