Letters from everywhere

Lynn, and I have been sending each other letters since undergrad, long before we started this postcard challenge. Posted to and from all over the world, amazingly, our letters have yet to be lost (or so I think!).

I am constantly curious about the journey our mail takes.  Lynn's first June drawing captures mailboxes she dropped letters into over the years. Her drawing provides a glimpse to the start of letter's journey, but it fills my curiosity only partially. What path did letters take when she sent them from Egypt to Samoa? What adventures? It is a journey I'd like to trace.
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Although the front of this card is a tale in itself, on its underbelly, Lynn wrote to me about the closing of school for the summer. The start of summer break is always sweet, but last year she also felt relieved to put distance on discussions of financial woes facing the public education system in Michigan. It can be a tiring, heated debate and is one that I listened to a lot growing up with a teacher as a mother. Although each day she would get up and work her heart out for her kids, her compensation, just as with most government jobs, depended on public policy and revenue rather than her effort or success. No rewards for hard work and no security if someone is relatively new or teaching elective classes.

It is the same in Ghana. Not only does a lack of incentives hinder teacher morale and performance, the budget is tight. In Ghana, nearly all of the education budget - which makes up a third of the government's total budget - goes to teacher salaries. This leaves the government with little money to build schools, develop materials, provide professional training - in short, to do anything other than pay teachers. Teachers deserve to be paid well, but each time I hear this debate, I always hope it will focus first on how to pay them rather than on blanket budget revisions. My two cents before school is out for the summer.

Slowing the snail

Snail mail just got slower. The New York Times reports that the U.S. Postal Service is closing 252 processing centers and laying off 28,000 employees. Its one day service is all but finished. It seems that our steadfast postal peoples' version of speedy was not quick enough to compete.

Sad news for those of us who love the taste of envelope glue.

Perspective

Blogging a year ago reminded Lynn about 'perspective.' What she meant by this was that she had remembered that when she was eleven she loved watching the Commander Marc program on PBS. He would draw lots of streets along with interconnected pipes to teach roundness via shading. This card was a back to the roots activity not just in its style, but in that the street is loosely based on Lynn's neighborhood growing up (a postcard from the past I never thought I would receive). Since I know that Lynn's family now lives in a new area, I was at first impressed by her memory, but then I began to think about my own childhood street and I feel like I can remember every blade of grass.

Perspective. It is drawing term that makes you step back and think. Have you been practicing this lately, Lynn?

Two!

Here are two cards Jess sent me to begin our second year of the "project." 

The first is a test post-card.  After a year, Jessica had to buy new post cards at papersource and ended up with these 'non traditional ones'.  My memory is of Jess and I talking on the phone, and her relating a story about being told these scalloped edged cards would not be allowed in the mail without an envelope.  Our plan was to have Jessica send something on a card, sans envelope, and see if it arrived.  It wasn't a drawing in case it got lost.  It didn't, and so in the mail I got this peaceful photo of Kerala, India from Jessica's time there in 2007.  Go post office, you came through for us!!!

Knowing we could rely on USPS again, Jessica then sent this cut out tree.  On the back she wrote about how we'd been at post cards for a year.  She used grey paper, some fancy stuff from her dad's office, writing "I planned to cut a cityscape by found the flow of cutting organic lines what I needed."  Then, she added a flower to make it feel less like fall/winter.  I like it! 

Postal Paws

So, the other day my mail carrier met my two dogs.  They impressed her with their behavior, and if you know them you know this means they were having a really great 60-90 seconds, and so now she usually leaves them milkbones in the mail.  At first I thought she just did it the next day, but now, its been nearly three weeks and the puppies get treat mail everyday! 

While I always mean to take my camera to the mailbox and get a picture of the mail inside it, I have yet to remember to do that, so here is a typical view of our mail sitting around on the kitchen table.

Perfectly aligned

So besides the fact that the post office, Lynn, and all of my other friends and family must think that I have disappeared off of the face of the earth and the fact that I hate being out of communication, I have been walking around feeling pretty happy recently. Feeling like there is a lot of awesomeness in this world despite what some may say. I was recently sent a link to a blog site, 1000 Awesome things, that reports on the many outstanding, amazing, satisfying, wonderful things in the world. Awesome thing 557 recognizes the glory of mail, specifically - when you fold a piece of paper and it fits perfectly in the envelope. Read it; I could not have expressed it better. Seriously, you don't get this feeling pushing send.

PS - Dont worry Lynn, my backlog of cards are on their way and this communication glut is ending.

Art Stamps!

A short post with something interesting happening at the post office (if there are any people still checking in with us).  In a few weeks some new stamps will be out.  I know most of us usually buy basic flags or the forever stamps, but really the pretty ones are the same price!  My favorites among the new stamps are those featuring abstract impressionist art, but there are some other fun options as well.  You can see all of them here.  Although, I am going to have to begin using international rate stamps...wonder what those will look like?

Shrinking

Friends, in the magazine The Week I recently read our dear post office is operating in the red and things aren't looking up. They're down $3.8 billion this year so far. Overall mail volume is declining and has been for three years. Now if you are like me, you get a lot of junk mail and you may begin to feel this big, bulky government system is just pushing around lots of worthless ads. You might even start to feel that we don't need the U.S. Postal serices.

But as you can tell, on this blog we are fans of the post office, postal system, and most postal workers! BIG FANS in fact. They have helped us to stay in touch for years. (In fact I believe Jessica and I once pondered which country's Post Office was shipping our letters between Japan and Samoa. Who was paying for them we wondered? But in the end we were just glad Air Mail existed as it allowed us to continue our communication.) So I'd like to encourage people to see the good in this service.

In the very informative article I read, a Post Office rep is quoted as saying, what would help is to "urge the public to mail a letter to a loved one and do it weekly." That's exactly what I'm doing-- people send some mail! I'll do you one better- take your Christmas and other Holiday gifts there to ship rather than the other guys. Stay tuned for this weeks coming blog post, it will help spring you to action on behalf of our shrinking postal services.