URL Update: Postalatry.org!

I just purchased postalatry.org, so anyone linking to this site may care to update their link.

The old URL will continue to work, of course.

Carving a Pen Chamber in a Moleskine

I think I've touched on my Moleskine (pron. MOLE-eh-SKEEN-eh) love before, right? The little black notebook that comes with the onion-skin pamphlet explaining how the notebook this was modeled on was actually the favorite of, like, Michaelangelo, Van Gogh, Hemingway, Jackie Chan, the Dalai Lama, &c.?

Someone forwarded me an online article by Treehugger, featuring six "awesome hacks" for your Moleskine notebook. Granted, I could easily buy enough Moleskines to build a small cabin, but it never occurred to me to get one just to mess around with and deface. So my wife surprised me out of nowhere by buying me one expressly for this purpose. "Get silly with this one," she said. "This is your Moleskine to go crazy with." She knows that I revere the Moleskine as basically a perfect end-product, so anything I put into it has to be polished and notable, but she believes I should let myself off the hook and get stupid with this one.

I decided to start with the hack in which you carve out a small chamber in which to lay a pen. The idea, ostensibly, is that you always have a pen with you when you grab that notebook.

Firstly, I'm never without a pen. Usually I've got two or three in my pocket, and even more if I've got my SwissGear air travel bag. I'm more likely to forget to bring a Moleskine than to grab a pen when I start my day.

Secondly, I really didn't want to screw up a nice Moleskine with my amateurish efforts. I don't know how the guy in Treehugger did it, but I'm guessing a Dremel would've been handy, whereas all I have are a couple X-acto knives and a boxcutter around here somewhere.

But I did go ahead and try it out, and here's my advice for anyone who'd like to do the same.

1. You can trace out the shape of the pen like I did, but now I'm kinda wishing I just went with a straight-line, right-angled rectangular box for the pen. I was thinking I'd create a more form-fitting chamber for my Slicci.
   
2. You can start digging next to the spine (and expect the pages may be a little flimsy to turn) but I would recommend centering your chamber vertically. I started mine out too close to the bottom and the first six pages shredded down by where the cap is pointing. Too close to the edge, especially for a beginner like me.
   
3. Use differential light to help with the cutting. You can see where your initial cut's supposed to go, because you've traced around the pen, but after that you're relying on the scratches that penetrated previous pages and those can be hard to line a knife upon. Set up a lamp to one side and, if you can, use natural daylight on the other side. Every contour and indentation will be much easier to discern.
   
4. Dig a rut in one side: once you've made your cut, retrace it over and over to dig deeper into subsequent pages. If you just trace the pattern over each time you get to a new page, you increase the likelihood of imperfectly replicating the shape and misshaping the chamber. You really want this thing to be as tidy and homogeneous as possible, and you can achieve that by digging in the same spot a few times.

Oh, also: remember to pull that woven fabric bookmark out. When you get to the middle of the Moleskine you won't slice the bookmark, but its presence will mess up your careful efforts to retrace the chamber.

But most important of all...

Use a fresh, new blade in your X-acto knife. I used a dull blade almost all the way through this project and it was a lot of work and took hours. When I replaced the blade with a new one, I nearly wept over the difference. I could have shaved an hour off my time and done a significantly more precise job with less effort and fewer mistakes.

A Pile of Out-Going Mail

Lots of letters going out this morning! I've been meaning to upkeep and address these pen pals I've had for so long, but I've been terrible at doing so. I can point to a number of factors that contributed to my procrastination (depression, job seeking, poor time management, &c.) but the end result is still that I haven't written in a long time.

Recently I have found the time and energy and I have this stack of letters and postcards to show for it. On the left are several fold-and-mail letters, enough to write a quick note if you write tiny, going out to France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and a couple points stateside. In the center are five custom-made postcards going out to people around the world through Postcrossing: it features me and my wife standing on the tracks of an old trolley still in existence here, running around Lake Harriet. Minneapolis used to have a network of trolleys hustling people from home to work and everywhere else, but of course that technology fell by the wayside (not in New Orleans, where people still ride these quaint vehicles for everyday business). And, like I write to every single person on the backs of these cards, despite living in this city for 13 years I still haven't managed to ride the Lake Harriet Trolley. Yet.

On the far right is a beer coaster printed by New Belgium brewery. It actually has space on the back for a destination address and a stamp, but I wonder how many people have actually mailed them out. I hope it's a large number, rather than... well, no need to cast aspersions here. I'm pleased to send out a large stack of mail and I hope this turns into a trend. I really want to cultivate these international pen pals and keep the mail flowing.

Illustrating the Distances

This was a great idea that never got off the ground: Google Map Envelopes.

Ideally, what you would do is write out an e-mail to a friend, then click the Google Envelopes button at the bottom of your text window. It would serve as an extension to your Gmail account (and it assumes you have entered your friend's mailing address).

"For a small fee" the program would print out your e-mail, fold it up, and insert it into an envelope that had been printed with a map of the distance between the sender and the recipient. Obviously, it would have to turn the map around most of the time, in order to make the sender's location always appear in the upper left.

Don't read the comments of the article in the link I provided, though. "Don't read the comments" is generally good advice wherever you read news on the Net, but it merits being mentioned in particular. I'll sum up: a bunch of people are very upset about the amount of paper that would be "wasted" on this project. Yet I doubt every single one of them is dedicated to recycling and mass transit, or even growing their own garden and storing solar/wind energy. They're just very judgmental of other people.

Personally, I thought this would have been a cute, fun idea to encourage people to send actual letters to each other. Yes, I hold the postal system to be particularly darling and I vaunt a little letter-writing above complete and total reliance upon online communication. And it's no secret I'm enamored of Google products, so I'm disappointed on a number of levels that this service never manifested.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of entries. Both my tower computer and my laptop crashed last week and I've been getting them examined. The tower is back home and running swell, but the laptop issued smoke out its rear ports and is pretty much cashed.

Artistry via Postcrossing

This is one of those cases that exemplifies or underscores what a delight it is to participate in Postcrossing.

(Yes, it's another Postcrossing post, sorry.)

I got this postcard in the mail today, sealed in an envelope with a print-out note, clean and understate European cursive on the outside. I don't mind receiving exposed postcards in the mail, as I like the traveled look and the cramped side (would that be verso? Or is the text always recto?) where stamps, address, and terse message fight for space.

The name of the artist was at the bottom, followed by "2007." The note was signed by the artist--she designed this illustration! I thought it was charming and, once I realized it was by a regular civilian who hasn't secluded herself in the ivory towers of professional artistic discipline, well-executed. There's a difference, to me, between artists you could run into on the street and artists who socialize only with other artists, publishing editors, and socialites at parties you will never, ever be invited to or even hear about. So even though I'm not an artist, it feels to me like the person who made this is someone a little more like me than the aforementioned aesthete in his/her rarefied atmosphere. This is someone I could run into on the street (were I in her nation). This is someone I could talk to without her taking offense at my presumption.

So best of luck, Marieke Lambermont, and thank you for the delightful postcard.

How To: Map Your Postcards Online

Would anyone be interested in learning how to chart their Postcrossing postcards in Picasa/Google Maps? If not, please go back and reread any of the delightful and highly informative entries with which this blog is liberally doused.

If so, this process I describe assumes four things:

• You're using Postcrossing.
• You're scanning in the postcards you receive.
• You're using Picasa to store these images on your hard drive.
• You're using Picasaweb to store and display them online.

You don't have to use Picasa: this process works in Flickr and any system that lets you attach a graphic image file to a map program.

1) a) When your postcard comes in, identify the sender's Postcrossing code. Register this in Postcrossing normally.

b) Go ahead and write a nice little note to the sender. It costs you nothing and means so much. It's such a slap in the face--to me, anyway--to hear nothing more than "THANKS" or nothing at all, but perhaps that's my fault for extending my identity schema too far into an online program.

2) When the card is registered, you are taken to a page that sums up the sender's profile and yours. If you've scanned the postcard, you can upload it here to add to your (and their) online gallery.

3) Click on the sender's name/handle--this takes you to the sender's profile. There's a little Google map labeled "Mailbox Location," click on Open in Google Maps beneath that image. This opens up a larger map with some detail as to the sender's registered location. At no time can you see their address through their profile, but if you visited the part of town indicated on this map, you probably wouldn't be far away from them.

4) In the Google Maps search bar (below the address bar in which you type URLs) you'll find a pair of coordinates. Highlight and copy this pair of coordinates. These are, of course, the latitude and longitude of the sender's registered location.

5) In Picasa, find the postcard in your collection and click on it once. Click on the Places button in the lower right of the Picasa window. Paste the coordinates into the search bar, at the bottom of the Places table. Click the magnifying glass icon to search, click OK to confirm the location.

When you view your online gallery, the right column will feature a world map with little red pegs indicating the locations of your postcards. Click on View Map beneath that image for a much larger map with little pictures of your postcards all around the world!

Zoom in, examine the postcards, cycle through your collection: this map is quite navigable and fun to play with. I know I get a little rush when I look at the sheer bulk of postcards from hundreds of nations.

Decisions, Decisions

Oh, the dilemma: two dashing suitors vying for her attention, each a world of pleasure and thrills in his own right, yet so diametrically opposed... and there was only room in her life for one.

Elegant and irresistibly demure, Audrey truly had the luxury of selecting any man she chose from a broad and teeming pool of options. Not wishing to crush any hearts, yet knowing she had to look out for her own best interests, she nevertheless whittled the roster down to the two most appealing candidates.

Cary, oh, Cary! Those eyes, that voice, the subtly amused smile that played about the corners of his lips while the rest of his expression gave away nothing... Cary! He melted her over cappuccino in that tiny bistro on Calle Larga San Marco, so near the action yet easily overlooked unless one were thoroughly familiar with Venice. It was his worldliness that won her over, this cosmopolite with the seductive purr who, admittedly, was old enough to be one of her father's younger friends.

And his spectral opposite, James: brash, unpolished, heady with restlessness and aimlessness. He almost put her off with his diffidence--after all, she knew her worth and was accustomed to being treated with an amount of deference. But the fact that he wasn't entirely available to her somehow enticed her, and it was on their symbolic trip from Independence (Missouri) to Junction City (Kansas) on a '41 Indian Chief that she started to fall for this unruly boy. It was one thing to have the world handed to you on a platter but quite another thing to have a small bundle of the Unknown dangled just out of reach. Especially when the Unknown hid behind lips like James'.

What was a girl to do?

The Office Outfit

Can you imagine owning your own "office outfit?" I'm not talking about a nice tweed suit with Oxfords and a tasteful silk tie. I'm talking about this little thing: brown cardboard box and electric blue lid containing an entire set of stamps for making your own customizable rubber stamp. Multiples of each letter, upper and lower case, stored in a nice wooden rack, waiting to be arrayed in a wide, thin handle for printing.

What would you use it for? When would you use this thing instead of a typewriter? When would it be more economical to assemble your own line or two of typeset rather than contacting a professional printer?

I suppose it would be handy to confirm receipt of certain documents, though it doesn't strike me as the pinnacle of convenience to throw "Received by" into a rack and stamp it out for a few pages, then replace all the letters--and I'd put them back in alphabetical order, though some people would just put them back into storage and call it done.

It would also be handy for printing on unconventional surfaces, like, a label on a bottle or anything else that couldn't easily be fed into a typewriter. It could be handier to print on a porous surface rather than feed a sheet of labels into a typewriter or something, I suppose.

This was an artifact of my grandparents', when I went to visit grandpa's house in Idaho (grandma has been deceased for several years). In my last trip two years ago, it was very important for me to go through their office supplies and see what were the accoutrement of their day, what they found necessary or handy to have around. My grandmother was a high school teacher and my grandfather dealt in real estate, and they must've done some considerable business at home, based on two rooms that have been sequestered for an office and storage for office supplies.