manders2280

Updated 30 December, 2021

Where's my rating? Where's Meredith?
Every few weeks I head to central Wisconsin to visit my husband's parents for a few days, 210mi/340km from our home to theirs. They are 88 and live in their home. I make nice meals and leave them leftovers and fresh pasta from Trader Joe's for easy meals. We don't do very much because it's a small city with little to do. I'm mostly offline for the duration of the visit because their WiFi is unreliable.

Audio books entertain me during the long, boring drive. Do you have a favorite to recommend to me?

I'm a retired software engineer and application architect. I'm working on websites for a couple of nonprofit organizations. I've learned when people ask me to build a website, I ask them to prepare content, enough for 30 webpages. That's often when their dream dies.

My kitchen is my craft room because I love cooking and baking. We are vegetarians, doing our bit for climate change. These days I'm simplifying complicated recipes, like crustless cheese-less quiche with three ingredients plus salt, pepper and herbs. What are your favorite foods? How do you make them? I drink lots of tea, mostly herbal now, if a swap suggests sending tea in sealed packets.

Sometimes I make fancy envelopes and some are pretty good. The best ideas come from mail art that I receive, like tearing a map to cover the front of an envelope. I have lots of Japanese washi tape and often use just that on outgoing envelopes. Some people tell me they pull it off the envelopes I send and reuse it. I would love to receive unused vintage US postage stamps or unused postage stamps from other countries to decorate envelopes. Lots of Stamps on an Envelope swap requirements don't say they all need to be from my country!

I enjoy writing and often send letters or longish notes with swaps, even when they aren't required. That's the extra I send. I'd love to receive lined letter paper, folded or not.

Traveling is my greatest love. I worked and lived in Israel and India and lived in Paris, all places I enjoyed despite not having time for sightseeing. (I never went up the Eiffel Tower.) Until the pandemic I traveled quite a bit. Now I'm waiting to see where I can go next. Where do you suggest we go? Can we Americans go to your country?

I swap for blank postcards in envelopes and written, naked postcards. I send the blank postcards I receive to family and friends and people on Postcrossing; I set them aside so I won't send them for Swap-bot swaps. I don't mind gently bent corners; I lop them off with a corner rounder. Please send nice, colorful and cheerful postcards that you'd happily send your family and friends.

If you're sending me a naked postcard, please send one that's a favorite of yours, sender's choice or for a swap with a theme.

No, thank you. Sorry, no hearts. Postcards from the US when you're from elsewhere! Postcards to color, postcards for Christian holidays and legends, and Zazzle postcards. Those cheap sepia 32-pcs Vintage Travel Sights Landscape Retro Postcards. Not those childish Distributed by Michael's Inc. designs. I have many Pomegranate postcards because I buy their remaindered postcard books at Half Price Books for $3. (Lucky you if there's a Half Price Books near you.)
Please, no junk.

Omurice!
Omurice is a wonderful quick dinner. I make it with Trader Joe's Japanese Fried Rice and extra frozen vegetables, thin omelettes that we lay over the fried rice, and ketchup. And now it's turning up in kawaii like Ojipan and I love them all!

My favorite kawaii has a face. I love food with faces and anchovies with legs and animals in an unlikely milieu like cat servers at faux Starbucks.

I'd appreciate stickers and memos for mail art: faux postage, letters, writing implements, and stationery.

I enjoy most characters, especially San-X. My favorite characters at the moment are Corocoro Coronya, gudetama lazy (or depressed or fatigued?) egg yolk, Kogepan Burnt Bread, and pastel Sentimental Circus.

I'm looking for kawaii books with faces. And puffins. How could all the kawaii artists have never thought to draw puffins?

No, thanks. Poo and bottoms aren't kawaii to me. 3D stickers from sheets and sticker flakes, especially PVC and puffy. Real photos made cute aren't so cute to me. Unicorns are too sweet for me.

• Louise Penny's binge-worthy mysteries featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache.
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
• Gunnie Rose series by Charlaine Harris
• Snow in August by Pete Hamill
• A Promised Land. Barack Obama's memoir, read by Barack Obama
• The Return of the Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. I read and loved the first three books in the series The Queen's Thief ages ago and will backtrack to 4 and 5 in the series.
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. I read this for book club and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's one of his feminist novels. It amazed us that his characters feel contemporary.
• I'm learning Talmud with a Daf Yomi group.
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It's excellent and deeply discouraging.
• Chalice by Robin McKinley, a YA fantasy author. I'm binging on her books now, as my turn comes up on the hold list. Every story is unique!
• Tara Westover's memoir Educated, about growing up in a Mormon survivalist family with her bipolar and possibly schizophrenic father.

January's Book Club Books
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

• Candles. My husband worries that we'll burn the house down.
• Christian holidays, etc. I'm Jewish.
• Coffee. I never started drinking it. I drink lots of tea!
• Ephemera, scrap book paper, die cuts, and the like. I'm not very good at paper craft. My phone is my planner and my journal is unadorned.
• Extras. I have plenty of kawaii, stickers and washi tape.
• Food. We keep kosher and we are vegetarians.
• Glitter, sequins and other tiny metallic or plastic bits
• Plastic, if possible. Reuse all those bubble mailers!
• Postcards: see above
• Tobacco smoke residue aka thirdhand smoke. See also thirdhandsmoke.org: People can be exposed to thirdhand smoke by touching contaminated surfaces (absorption through the skin).
• Unicorns, unless they are images of the Unicorn Tapestries dating from the late Middle Ages.