10/29: postcard pleasure

6 postcards in today's mail!

1. From someone at sendsomething.net: I had sent a Lomo photograph to her, and she sent an art postcard back. The card has a drawing of a hand on it, and this seems a little fortuitous because I've been playing with the idea of having "hand" as a mail/blog theme for 2010, just as "sky" has been a theme with my (y)our sky project this year.

2. From someone at the postcrossing forum: a reprint of Picasso's Las Meninas. I didn't know Picasso had done a rendition of Velazquez's painting, and I'm looking forward to putting them together side by side to do a comparison and contrast.

3. From someone in a poetry-on-a-postcard swap at swap-bot: the poetry was missing (it must have been pasted onto the back and then gotten unglued while travelling through the mail), but the image on the card--an ancient Chinese spoon--is fantastic. And I think that blank white space can be Zen poetry.

4. From someone at postcrossing: she lives in Minsk and she told me about her day, which is something I always love to hear about. She had just gotten a new coat, and that detail delights me.

5. From another postcrosser: her card featured palm trees in Santa Barbara, and I found that coincidental since we had just translated the phrase lentae palmae ("pliant palm trees") in my Ovid class this afternoon. We had lingered on the phrase because lentae can also mean "sluggish" or "sticky," so we needed to decide which meaning made best sense when applied to palm trees. ("Pliant" beats "sluggish" and "sticky," hands down.)

6. And from another postcrosser: the sender happened to be another teacher (always a pleasure to meet fellow teachers), and she said that she hoped her card would make me smile and would be my good thing for the day. And so it is!

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