28. Send 40 postcards to 40 different people

When I initially set this as one of my goals, I envisioned sending postcards to people I knew. Then I started seeing posts over on Twitter referring to this thing called “postcrossing.” So I headed over to postcrossing.com to see what the fuss was all about.

The premise is that you “send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!” And it works! It truly works! As you can see, I’ve sent 40 postcards that have been received and registered (4 others have been traveling more than 60 days – boo!) What you can’t see is that I’ve received 37 postcards back already.

More than six times around the earth!

My favorite postcard (that I’ve received) was from a young boy in Taiwan who plays baseball and painted a watercolor of a ballpark as his postcard. My favorite sent postcard? Tough call – but there is one neat one of Boston from the top of the Prudential Center that I like a lot.

Postcards take less time traveling to Germany and Romania than to the US.

I love the things I’ve found out from doing this, too. I’ve sent postcards to 6 year olds (and their parents), people in their 70s, high school and college students, men and women, families and individual, and I’ve sent them all over the world, as you can tell. That tells me that people like getting mail. Whenever there’s a postcard in my mailbox, I get a little thrill, wondering where and who it’s from.

Pie chart!

The other really interesting thing I found out is that the fine folks in Finland are postcard FOOLS! Yes, it’s true – Finns are the most active members of Postcrossing thanks to their long-standing tradition of sending postcards, most often during the Christmas holidays. In fact, one Finnish member of postcrossing specifically requested that people NOT send him Christmas-related postcards, since he receives so many of them each year already.

This has been one of the longer challenges of this year – it’s taken me 8 months to reach 40 sent/registered postcards. Given the fact that I’ve purchased a bunch of fun postcards specifically for the challenge (and have a bunch left over) you can be sure that I’ll continue with my postcrossing adventures into the future.

6. Get a massage

Big huge thanks to my friend Shelly in Germany for giving me a gift certificate to Caring Touch Massage Therapy to help me move into my 40s! Katrina, who owns Caring Touch, sidled up to me the other day at the gym and slipped me an envelope. Inside that envelope was the afore-mentioned gift certificate, along with a note from Shelly thanking me for my friendship (we’ve known each other since I worked at the University of Northern Iowa, way back in the late 90s) and wishing me well as I moved into a new decade of life. Needless to say, I got a little teary and sniffly.

Highly recommended!

And so I ran home, checked Katrina’s schedule, and got myself on her calendar ASAP. The massage was wonderful – she focused on my legs per my request – and I felt like I was walking on jelly for about 2 days. I’d highly recommend Katrina! And I’d highly recommend being friends with Shelly too. They are both simply wonderful!

11. Go sledding

Amy and I went sledding at her sister’s house on February 26, 2011. I don’t have photos from that day, but it looked a little bit like this (same location, same jacket, same dogs):

Wahoo!

Surprisingly, her kids didn’t want to go sledding with us. Slackers!

36. Try dragonfruit

Huh. Wasn’t expecting this experience to be quite like this. Purchased the dragonfruit on February 20.

Found it at Russo's - unsurprising!

Ripe, but not too ripe

Ate it on February 26. I think perhaps I waited too long between purchase and ingestion.

Nearly a week later (i.e. too ripe)

Ready to eat!

It tasted … bland. Kind of vaguely tropical. Sweet, a bit. I was underwhelmed. although if given the chance, would try it again, especially if it didn’t appear to be overripe.

16. Go to a Providence Bruins game

January 21 was the big day – a whole big group of us went to the P-Bruins game. Amy organized it – got tickets for the group of us, managed to score us some swag since we are a hockey team (super-cute baseball caps!), and even got 2 free tickets for organizing it! We passed those on to our friends who actually live in Providence.

Obligatory self-portrait

I think they won, but I forget. I really just cared about getting my photo taken with the mascot….

Sejal, Samboni the mascot, me, and Sejal's friend whose name I totally can't remember