Postcards and Penpals

One day on the Etsy forums (in early 2008) someone posted a thread about penpals. They would match you up with another Etsy user as a penpal if you were interested. I have rarely turned down the opportunity for a penpal, so I quickly signed up. I am still in contact with a penpal I was matched with in Grade 4 from OWL magazine, so was hoping to find another great penpal. I've had many through the years, but none that lasted for more than a few years or so, other than the one I met through OWL. I don't think this match could have worked out better. I got matched with Taina who lived in NYC. I was living in the Bay Area, California at the time. We hit it off immediately as you can through letters. Here was the first piece of mail I received in January 2008.

In one of her first few letters, she mentioned that she would probably be using postcards more than letters. I was excited about that because I had a bit of a stationery obsession and had a few postcards sets from Chronicle Books. So since then we have been sending piles of postcards to each other. We would use letter stationery as well, since who can resist Chronicle's stationery sets, but the majority has been postcards.
We've even met in person! In August 2009, I moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Southern Ontario. The following December my sister moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn. This past April and July I drove out to Brooklyn to visit my sister. On both trips, I made sure to spend some time with Taina. Luckily, it wasn't weird and we had great times! Although, the amount of postcards has diminished somewhat, since I have moved back to Canada just because of the price of postage. We used to write whole letters, but use five or six postcards. That's easy to do when it's only 27 cents to send one! Oh, we still send plenty (I don't want to know how much the both of us have spent on stamps!) and are keeping the postal workers busy and hopefully they enjoy seeing all these postcards! Whenever I mailed my Etsy parcels I would usually have a stack of postcards with them. The postal worker always looked at them. I had this one really strange card with carrots dancing, he found this so funny and told me whenever there is a funny or strange card that comes through they all show them to each other. It's nice to think we are adding interest to their day!

I've decided to photograph some of my favourite postcards and put them in this blog. Since I know I will never remember to do this every week, I've taken photos of a bunch today and will time post them! Clever! Stay tuned!