vendredi 30 novembre 2012

November's mail

November is already over! I know I say that each time I post my stats of the month but: how time flies! That's crazy! Only one more month and we'll say bye bye to 2012 (well unless if we all die on December 21st, but I personally don't believe it at all. Do you?)

Anyway. Here's the letters that arrived in my mailbox in November 2012. 13 letters, and they actually represent my current to-reply pile. Yes, I'm one month late in my replies. And it might really get worse as I won't have time to write at all (or so little) before December 19th. Dear penpals, blame my exams for that ;)


13 letters in 30 days mean 0.4 letter per day or a letter every 2.3 days. Actually, it was more like a letter per day during 2 weeks and then almost no letters at all during the 2 other weeks. Statistics aren't always very representative of reality!

Average distance travelled: 1781.31 km
Longest distance travelled: 5848 km from Boston, USA
Shortest distance travelled: 681 km from Nijmegen, Netherlands

December doesn't start really good for me: I have a problem at my apartment, there's no more cold water. I hope it'll be fixed soon, because it's very problematic!
I hope you'll all have a nice December, with plenty of mail and nice Christmas presents for those who celebrate Christmas!

Love, Tári

PS: There's no weekly mail update today, because my mail week was totally empty: no letters received, and no letters sent either. 

dimanche 25 novembre 2012

4 things Sunday #6


Time for the 4 things Sunday again! :D So first let's see how I managed last week:

  • clean the bathroom: done
  • re organize my bookshelf: done (it made me feel like buying new books now that I saved room in my bookshelf...)
  • buy Christmas presents for my family: failed. I still have to find a present for my mother
  • continue reading the texts I should have read since September: failed (I'm such a bad student...)
And now, the goals for this week:
  • buy my mother's Christmas present
  • read all the texts I have to read before the exams
  • type my notes from lectures
  • write one letter
And what about your goals? Tell me! ;)

Love, Tári

vendredi 23 novembre 2012

Finally here it is!

Apparently I have already uploaded too many pictures with my previous Blogger account. The pics you upload on your blog are stored in a Picasa account and there you can only store 1 Go of pictures for free. To store more you have to pay and I don't want to, so I just created another Blogger account, and now I can finally upload pictures without any troubles, so here I am with my mail update! :D

Mail seem to never stop piling up in my folder :/ I hope I'll be able to catch up with all these pending letters before 2013, but as time goes by and I keep getting letters and having less and less free time due to exams coming sooner and sooner, I'm more and more doubtful about this. But okay, I still love my penpals and enjoy reading every single word from them! <3

The first letter I got this week arrived on Tuesday from the Ukraine. As Tuesday is the only day when I have time to go home for lunch, I found the letter then and started to read it asap, but it was so long that I had to finish reading it in the bus back to uni for afternoon classes :D
Needless to mention I loved the envelope - I think everyone knows I have a soft spot for air mail items :)

Then on Wednesday I got this letter from Reetta in Finland, written on lovely paper!
And look at the cute little bird on the stamp!

Finally I got a third letter this week, from Paula in Estonia:

As for the outgoing mail, I wrote two letters this week, what I'm very happy about because I really thought I wouldn't have time to even finish the first one. Yet I started to write letters in the very early morning, before leaving for classes, so this way I gained quite much writing time. Besides, now I have a good motivation to get out of my bed :) Usually it's so damn hard for me to get up, especially when I think about all the work that is waiting for me :/

So what did I wrote this week, well, first a letter to Maiju in Finland! As you can see I started using my Winter paper ;)

And this morning I just finished and posted a letter to my French penpal in Germany, Audrey. I hope she'll like the owl paper as much as I do! :)

Anyone else writes letters in the early morning? :)
Love, Tári

There's something going wrong...

It seems that I can't post my weekly mail update because Blogger doesn't want me to upload pictures :S It says I've gone out of the storage space that is allowed to me.
Anyone else having troubles uploading pictures on Blogger?

lundi 19 novembre 2012

Let's say it's Sunday!

Yes, let's say it's still Sunday, because I completely forgot to post my new goals for the week yesterday! I spent the whole evening writing a letter (which I still haven't finished although I went to bed at ~11.45 pm)
But here I am now with my 4 things Sunday! And who cares it's actually Monday? :P


First, let's see how I managed last week:

  • eat vegetables everyday: done (yay for healthy food! :D)
  • write two letters: done
  • start reading all the texts I should have read for a lecture since September: hmm... I said "start", so, done! I've read two texts - over... something like twenty (ugh D:)
  • clean the bathroom: failed. 

And now, my goals for the new week:
  • clean the bathroom
  • re organize my bookshelf
  • buy Christmas presents for my family
  • continue reading these texts I should have read since September

What about your goals, dear readers? I'm curious to know! ;)
Love, Tári


vendredi 16 novembre 2012

I don't know...

...whether I should smile or cry when I find a letter in my mailbox. Really. Because... take a look at the inside of my to-reply folder:
Yes. It's full to bursting. Please, dear penpals, be patient for my replies! D:

This week I received three letters. They all were enjoyable and I was glad to hear from these penpals again, but then when I added the envelopes to the pending pile, I was like "Oh my, how will I manage to write them all on time!?"

The first envelope I found in my mailbox was from Belgium, and it wasn't a letter (I don't have any penpal from Belgium actually), but a swap. I took part in a socks swap in a swapping group on Facebook and here's what I received (I forgot to take a pic of what I sent however, sorry :/)
Look how long these winter socks are!
And on my legs:
(Have you ever tried to take your legs in picture? It's damn hard!)

The first letters of the week arrived on Wednesday: the first was from Anne Mette in Denmark, she replied my letter really fast. Of course I like fast replies (who doesn't?) but on the other hand that makes me feel a little ashamed of not being able to reply equally fast.

And the second was from Kate in Czech Republic, nice to hear from her again! Her last letter was from the summer.
She sent me a bookmark with Egyptian letters and a collection of pictures that made her smile. Very nice idea!

And on Thursday came a letter from Sofie, a girl I found through her ad on Penpal of the Week:
I love the winter themed paper with the little pingoo's! So cute :) And the stamps are simply amazing, don't you agree?

Now let's talk about the outgoing. I'm proud to say that I've been letter productive this week! Yay! I took the week end off from studying because I thought I deserved it after mid-term exams week, and besides from next week on my life will be hectic again because I'll have to start studying for final term exams already.
So during my free week end, I wrote three letters! Yes, you read it right, three!

The first one is to Ingrid in the Netherlands and it's pretty short actually -.- But she didn't ask questions in her letter and I have troubles replying letters when there are no questions in them because there isn't so much to say about my daily life, besides studying I don't do much more sadly.

Then I felt like designing an air mail envelope and the "victim" was Michi in Poland ^^ This letter is much longer, by the way!

Then on Sunday evening I wrote to Jennifer in the UK. The letter is typed but I think it turned out quite nice, I tried to use a nice font and to decorate the paper with stickers. I don't like sending typed letters, but I thought it could help me to catch up faster if I typed a letter once in a while. Plus Jennifer said she didn't mind.  Do you type your letters sometimes?

And finally along the week I wrote this 10 A4 pages long letter to my dear Almante in Lithuania. I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish it within the week, but finally I did, it went out just this morning :)

I don't think I will have so much outgoing mail to show you next week. I'm only hoping to write one letter :/ Aah, the joys of being a double major student!

Have you written a lot this week, or received much mail?
Love, Tári

dimanche 11 novembre 2012

4 things sunday #4


How did I manage this week?
Last week I challenged myself to:

  • eat vegetables everyday: failed :/ (I really need more healthy food)
  • spend an entire day away from Internet: here again, failed. Yet I don't think I've wasted too much time on the computer as I usually did.
  • study for my upcoming exams: done (now let's wait for the results...)
  • write one letter: done

Now, my challenges for the upcoming week:
  • eat vegetables everyday
  • write two letters
  • start reading all the texts I should have read for a lecture since September (Huh... I'm not a serious student XD)
  • clean the bathroom

What about your challenges for this week?
Love, Tári

vendredi 9 novembre 2012

Unexpected letters are the best.

Hello readers! It's already Friday again, so time to tell you about what was in my mailbox (many things :) ) and what left France (not so many things u.u) this week.

Let's start with the incoming. First on Monday I received a letter from my Romanian penpal Andra! It really seems her letters to me have no luck lately because her previous letter got wet along the way, and now, look how I found her new letter:
:( But hopefully the content of the envelope wasn't so much damaged.
She sent some tea! Great! Although I don't really like orange flavoured teas, I still enjoyed them. Rooibos tea always is enjoyable ;)

Then, on Thursday I got a letter from Simona from Lithuania. It traveled really fast! Mail is quite strange at the moment, most letters are delayed for some unknown reasons, but few come unexpectedly fast. Have you noticed such weird things about mail too? Or is it just the French post system which is doing weird?
Anyways, back to Simona's letter ^^ Here it is:

And today: a mail flood! Three letters! Actually when I first came back home at 11.30 am I checked the mail and there was nothing, so I thought "no letters for me today!". But when I left to attend my lecture later in the afternoon, I noticed that the slot through which the mailman put the mail in my mailbox was open, so, I checked the mail again and.... there were these three letters! What a nice surprise! Getting mail when you're not expecting it makes your day even more, don't you think?

The first of these three letters was from Sille, Estonia:
She sent me a tea I'm pretty impatient to try because it's citrus tea and I love citrus tea ;)

Then there was a pink-ish letter from my English friend Louise:

And last but not least, this black envelope from Marita in Norway I found pretty classy:
I hadn't heard about Marita since the summer, so it was very nice to find her letter in my mailbox!
She told me about her trip to Mallorca, and sent a nice card (written all in Norwegian, and I understood it all, yay!), a brochure about an attraction park she went to, plus some pics of her cat who's way too cute! :3

Well, getting all this mail is very nice, but it doesn't help shortening my pile of pending letters... especially since this week I only had time to write one letter :S
I had three exams this week, plus I had to finish my thesis project to send it to my teacher (the deadline was November 8th - yesterday), so it left me really little time for letters. Plus - is it the stress, or am I getting sick? - I am feeling dead tired although I tried to go to sleep early every day. I just hope everything will get better now that my life is going to calm down a bit.

Anyway. The outgoing letter is here, it's to Sara in Italy. It looks a little messy :S I had some troubles with the ink of my pen, and as I'm so tired I made many mistakes and needed lots of tipp-ex u.u I just hope she'll like it anyways!

I hope you're doing alright, dear readers (better than me at least :P)
Love, Tári

jeudi 8 novembre 2012

Have I already told you...

... how much I love writing papers?
Yes, like most of you readers I guess, I love stationery. It makes the letter even more enjoyable for both the sender and the recipient, don't you think? That's why when I saw on Julie's blog that she was selling some of her stationery, I felt obliged to order some because according to what I can see on her blog posts, she always use very nice papers :)

My order arrived on Monday and that's what I'm going to show you in this post (yeah, I know, I'm a lil' bit late...)
 I love how neat stationery packages from Julie are.

Nice coincidence, she wrote her little note on one of my all-time favourite designs from her shop!

Oh my, there are too many things! Where to start! :S

Okay... here we go!
I had never seen black writing papers before... I hope I'll find a good pen to write on them!  















Some designs from La Papierre shop (including my two favourite ones, yay! :D)


I don't know if I'll use all these papers, some designs doesn't really suit my liking (actually I couldn't know what exactly was in the package I ordered, it was a surprise), maybe I'll swap some, we'll see!

Love, Tári