postcard for E and mail received

Today I mailed a postcard to my little friend Ewan.  He is a pretty rad little dude and I love him and his parents a lot.  I had a visit with him and his mom this morning and they had made me cupcakes that looked like dirt with carrots sticking out of the top-amazing!!  He is such a funny guy with a big heart and loads of energy.  And I’ll bet he likes mail.  In fact, his mom is the one who bought me my “I heart mail” pin so many years ago!

Don’t ruin the surprise for him Char!

Also, check out this most incredible piece of mail that I received today!!!  All the way from the UK!

Here is a bit of the story behind the lovely man who sent this to me.  In the fall of last year, I found out the incredible news that I have a brother.  Simon.  He is almost 10 years older than me and we share the same father.  He was adopted when he was a baby and after his mom found him last year, she also found my mom and therefore my sister and I (through a family friend-that is a whole other story) and then him and I were connected.

I still remember the first email I sent to him. Reading it over and over, I realized there was no way to write to him without sounding like a complete moron.  How exactly do you introduce yourself to your brother that you have had your whole life and yet are just meeting, through text, for the first time?  Well, he was and continues to be very generous with his words and support and love and I feel pretty darn lucky in the whole brother department.  We now exchange emails on a regular basis and are gradually getting to know each other.  He is a stellar guy with a fabulous sense of humour.

Simon and I happen to share a love of plants (thank you fantastic gene pool) and he sent me a book and letter explaining that the book had been one of the first he purchased for himself and that because of my mail challenge, and my farming business, he had been inspired to mail it to me.  Hooray!

How great is my brother?!  If you have a brother, you should mail him something and tell him how great he is.  If he’s great.

more thanks

I almost didn’t send mail today.  Because I didn’t want to.  My daughter, Aylah, was home sick (not really sick, but sniffly and phlegmy and I know where that leads so I kept her home) and I wasn’t in the mood to thank anyone or get in touch with anyone.  So I left it and left it and finally I had a moment of inspiration and wrote a thank you to Quidditas.

Have you been to Quidditas? www.quidditasvancouver.blogspot.com The place smells good, feels good and always has nice people with good energy available to answer questions and make recommendations.  I took a photo of the writing inside of this card, then sealed it to mail it and when I looked at the photo it was crap.  So you’ll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that it basically said this:  “My daughter and I went to your lovely store today to get some vitamins and a lovely tattooed lady helped us and another lovely lady made us healing smoothies.  When we were leaving Aylah said “I love that store”.  And I realized I love it too and you should know how great you are and thank you for being so great.”  I think it sounded better in the card.

Stefano just told me this is his favorite card that I made.  I made it with a spring of fennel and the speedball ink.  I think I will make more.

Off to the mailbox for me!

more thanks and mail received

Yesterday, a lovely guy from Asia Pacific Mushroom farm in Aldergrove, who I met at the Meet your Maker event, dropped off 6 pounds of organic oyster mushrooms as a sample for Three Feet Below to try and make a pickled oyster mushroom he had tasted years ago in Germany.  Sweet!  So today, that is just what I did.  There were 2 different kinds of oyster mushrooms and I tried 2 different recipes, one with rice vinegar and the other with apple cider vinegar.  My mail today is to thank Eric for bringing me mushrooms-so excellent!

And I received mail!  A cheque for Three Feet Below for a full share from one of our friends at Richmond Farm School (amazing!) and the other from my friend Thyrza.  I love mail!!

I gave Thyrza a jar of our peach butter and it sounds like it was a hit!  And I love the image of Max hyperventilating every day before a walk.  He is definately the most excitable of their 4 dogs and I can just see him, so freaky excited to be going for a walk.  Oh Max.

a complaint and mail received

Today’s mail is not a thank you.  It is a complaint.  Last week, Stefano drove Aylah to school on the day I was feeling yuck.  Late last week, he received a fine in the mail from the city’s by-law office for $50 (if paid by March 14th) for “parking too far from the curb”.  Completely bogus.  For starters, he didn’t even park (knowing him, he probably barely stopped!) and secondly, it offends me to know that by-law officers routinely visit schools before and after school and just give random fines, to parents that are dropping off or picking up their kids.  Not parents that are double parked or blocking an entrance or speeding through the school zone, but parents just doing their job, getting their kids to school on time.

So I sent the by-law office a postcard to possibly help them remember that we are all human and love our kids and that there are things out there far more important to spend tax-payer’s money on than the salary of by-law officers that hide in bushes and give bogus fines.

I put on my least favorite stamp by the way.

Also, I received mail today!  A cheque for a half share of Three Feet Below preserves from my good friends in Gibsons and some seeds from the lovely Siskiyou Seeds (www.siskiyouseeds.com).  Now I have to tell you that having Nick and Sylvia in Gibsons buy half a share of our preserves is a real compliment because Sylvia can can with the best of them.

Notice Sylvia’s beautiful little block print that she puts on all the jams she makes?  And isn’t that card hilarious??

One more thing; my good friend Gretchen emailed me to tell me she had mailed a card to a friend who had recently helped her with some big work in the bakery she is opening in North Vancouver (www.hereandnowbaking.com).  Her goods are drooly good.  I love that she shared her mail with me!

to the singer in the house

Today I mailed a postcard to Aylah, my lovely and talented daughter.  This morning, when I was voicing that I had to figure out who I would send mail to, she said “how about to me?”.

Aylah is in a musical theatre group at Arts Umbrella www.artsumbrella.com and today performed a solo (as well as in a group performance) at Winterruption, a super fun and mostly free event at Granville Island.  Amazing!!  She sang so beautifully and got tonnes of compliments (not just from me) after the show.  I have to say that I was not even half as cool as she is at age 10 (or at age 40 to be honest).  She blows me away with her confidence and her willingness to put herself out there.  And her voice is truly jaw-dropping.  She is a gorgeous girl and I am a very proud mama.

a little getaway

Yesterday, I went to the Tigh-Na-Mara www.tigh-na-mara.c0m spa in Parksville, on Vancouver Island with my dear friend Shelley.  She had an Airmiles coupon burning a hole in her pocket that allowed us to stay the night, get a credit toward spa services and have an endless tapas dinner.

It was glorious!!  The trip over was uneventful and we caught up a lot, we had time to go in the mineral pool (short, but it felt so good!), we got incredible pedicures and then we guzzled a bottle of wine while eating our body weight in tapas, all the while yucking it up with our hilarious server.  I mailed this postcard from the ferry terminal on our way home, to the spa, to thank the people who made our visit great.  I hope they all get a raise.

Thank you too to Shelley for sharing your coupon with me and making me laugh so much.  I really do love the memories we have of our hilarious times together.

P.S. I made this postcard too!  With a fennel frond and some spray paint.  So cool!  It reminds me of a cloud.

a note of thanks

How do you like my spray bombed fern?  Nice hey?

Today, just a quick note of thanks to one of the masterminds behind the Meet your Maker event I went to on Monday.  When I freaked out momentarily after hearing that it was expected of me to have a stand with products and realized our business is just not there yet, Erin encouraged me to come anyway, meet people and enjoy.  And I did.  And I am grateful to her for her encouragement and all the hard work she put into what was an amazing day for me and probably a whole lot of other people.

 

Heather’s birthday

I knew it was my aunt Heather’s birthday next week, but my mom reminded me when I spoke with her yesterday that it is her 60th!  I had collected some leaves from my walk this morning intending to try to make prints with them so this seemed like a good opportunity to see what I could come up with.  Not bad hey?

Stefano taught me how to use speedball ink in a quick lesson and off I went.  It was fun! I made quite a few that will show up on this blog over the next little while and will keep experimenting with different objects to make prints of.

Here’s a little bit of info about my aunt Heather.  She is number 2 of 4, my mom being number 1.  She lives in Edmonton, has lived in Churchill (Manitoba), Winnipeg and now Edmonton.  She has been with my uncle Randy since she was 17.  That blows my mind.  Her and my uncle always find the most interesting things to do in the city they live in and any place that they visit.  I mean it.  They are making a trip in the spring to Savannah, Georgia to go on a tour of garden courtyards that are usually closed to the public.  That sounds amazing to me.

Here is my favorite memory of my aunt Heather.  Once she came to visit when my uncle was working here and her and I spent the day together.  We mapped out 6 Value Villages and went to every single one of them in a day.  We stopped only for lunch.  Aylah was very little at the time and when she got tired, I got a shopping cart from the Value Village we were at, laid a blanket down in it for her and she fell asleep while we continued shopping.  It was hard core awesome.

Happy Birthday auntie Heather!

short and sweet

Today I decided to send a thank you to Sunset magazine for being so great and for giving my business partners and me the idea of starting Three Feet Below.  Have you ever read an issue of Sunset?  http://www.sunset.com  It is my favorite magazine at the moment, ever since Readymade went and died.

So the postcard says it all and I don’t have much more to say because I am not feeling well today and I want to go back to bed now that my mail is done.

Have you sent any mail?

P.S. Don’t worry, I put a stamp on before I mailed it.

a boy and his horn

Today, a note to Rowan, my 21-year-old son.  He had asked my husband Stefano if he could bring his trumpet to the farmer’s market this Saturday as he will be there, working with the farm he is now apprenticing with, Klippers. http://www.klippersorganics.com

Now I could turn this post into a rant about how great I think Rowan is, how proud I am of him for following his heart and changing his focus completely from carpentry/joinery to farming, how excited I am at how much he is learning and how much I love talking to him about everything he knows already, but you probably all know that already.  So I’ll just mention that Rowan’s love of trumpet is one of my favorite things about him.

Rowan took trumpet lessons first when he was about 13 years old I think.  His dad bought him his own instrument a couple of years later and at times, he has practiced every day and sounded better and better and at other times, just listened to the greatest trumpet music I have ever heard.  Let me tell you, Rowan has really good taste in music.  The last time he was home, he was playing his iPod in the living room and every new artist that came on I needed to know about.  If asked, he might tell you some story about how my love of music when he was growing up inspired him to play trumpet or find artists that are obscure yet amazing, but I don’t think that is the case.  Rowan is a self-made man and a damn good one.

We talk about farming together one day and he is actively saving to buy land sometime in the near future.  I can’t wait.