Letter Writing Club Tonight

So we're back into the swing of things, and I almost forgot that our Letter Writing Club is this evening! It was so nice to come back from our trip to find a nice little pile of mail waiting for me mixed in with the bills and invoices and promotions. There's nothing like a handful of letters written from desks around the world. I tore into all of them to see what exciting things all of my pen pals are up to, and I'm enjoying taking my time to write back. Which is perfect because our Letter Writing Club is this evening, 7-9pm in the shop. Treats and coffee, hopefully the cat will be in the shop and not skulking around the boxes in the packing area, and hopefully the baby will be sound asleep so I can enjoy my tea and my letters and a few conversations. And while we're on the subject of letter writing: a little blurb about us appeared on the Letter Writers Alliance blog while we were on our trip! You can find the article on us here.

The LWA blog is a must read for snail mail enthusiasts - they write about new stamp releases, exhibits, events, and also sorts of inspiring and letter writing things. It's the blog of the Letter Writers Alliance, which is an organization that promotes and shares the love of writing letters. They have a pen pal service, and stationery for sale, and also hold online letter writing socials, in case you're not nearby a club or a meet in person. Donovan from the LWA wrote to me a while ago very generously offering to send us a few LWA treats, which we now have waiting patiently for our next Letter Writing Club, and of course I had to write back. So I will hope to see you here tonight!

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Behind the scenes, we're busy as always. We got some new shelving and some new plastic bins to replace some frayed cardboard boxes of various sizes and shapes that we've been using to sort and organized different pens. Jon and the team put the new shelving together and moved around some of our existing shelving, and while it's still sort of a mess as we organize it back onto the shelves, it looks great! My favourite kind of mess: pens and paper and ink everywhere, with a cat darting here and there. Behind the shop, we got a free NHL Chicago Bears rug for the apartment. At first I was a bit disappointed - I don't follow the NHL very closely (or at all), so I picked the Chicago Bears team because the picture showed a little bear face on it. When we opened the rug, it turns out there's no bear, just a big C. A friend of mine who does follow sports closely and even knows how of how to bet on sports through places like FanDuel told me that it was actually for NFL and it was the logo for the Chicago Bears team. Either way, we got the rug and my little bears seem to love it. I guess the C kind of works for Caleb, but it turns out that both of my little bears love this new rug. As soon as I opened it both Caleb (naked) and Super (also naked) came over and literally started rolling over and rubbing their backs on it - it's like they've been deprived of comfortable flooring their entire lives. We used to have foam mats covering the concrete, especially with Caleb ricocheting off everything, but they all had to be thrown out with the flooding. Jon says we should just save up all of these free rugs and make a mosaic of NHL teams. These past few days I've been back to work! Catching up on emails, catching up on orders, getting a few thoughts up on the blog. I've been popping in and out of the shop and having great luck catching a few customers to say hello to. These days I'm not in the shop so much, so I don't recognize a lot of customers. In any case most of our long-time ones have forgotten about me, so it's a real treat to find one who remembers who I am. And I also need to mention that if you've left a comment on the blog, and it seems like it's lost in cyber space, it's actually just lost in my spam queue, which some days may as well be cyber space. For some reason I've been getting a lot of spam comments despite my filters, and I'm trying not to take it personally that they're mostly about how to improve my SEO and where to find 'fresh and unique content.' Coming back from the trip was an all-time high for me in comments awaiting moderation. We've been busy getting new things in and up on the website - new Diamine Shimmertastic inks, the TWSBI Vac-Mini in Smoke, Field Notes Byline, an exciting little something from Pilot, which we're hoping to get going on tomorrow. We've also got a tiny new initiative that is pretty close to my heart launching later this week, and I can't wait to share it with you. Lots and lots to come!