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Friday, September 30, 2016

Interesting Reading and recipes

Such an inspiring story of Gabe Adams, what's your excuse?

Spite House what a delightful house with wonderful stories of its beginning

8 vegetable meat pie kids will love

For the stamp enthusiasts, USA have announced their 2017 Stamp Issues

How to get rid of Bunions naturally and why they are caused

Imagine having this history in your home, goes to show dont discount those weird dreams you have.

How to become famous without trying....eat a pork bun

15 lazy yummy meals

Freezer dinner jackets

Internal clock makes  you age faster and die younger

Adorable twins captured by mums imagination Leia and Lauren Lok through mum's photography lens


Old fashioned way of delivering letters



Books I am reading
The United States Postal Service is a wondrous American creation. Seven days a week, its army of 300,000 letter carriers delivers 513 million pieces of mail, forty percent of the world’s volume. It is far more efficient than any other mail service—more than twice as efficient as the Japanese and easily outpacing the Germans and British. And the USPS has a storied history. Founded by Benjamin Franklin, it was the information network that bound far-flung Americans together, fostered a common culture, and helped American business to prosper. A first class stamp remains one of the greatest bargains of all time, and yet, the USPS is slowly vanishing. Critics say it is slow and archaic. Mail volume is down. The workforce is shrinking. Post offices are closing.

In Neither Snow Nor Rain, journalist Devin Leonard tackles the fascinating, centuries-long history of the USPS, from the first letter carriers through Franklin’s days, when postmasters worked out of their homes and post roads cut new paths through the wilderness. Under Andrew Jackson, the post office was molded into a vast patronage machine, and by the 1870s, over seventy percent of federal employees were postal workers. As the country boomed, USPS aggressively developed new technology, from mobile post offices on railroads and air mail service to mechanical sorting machines and optical character readers.

Neither Snow Nor Rain is a rich, multifaceted history, full of remarkable characters, from the stamp-collecting FDR, to the revolutionaries who challenged USPS’s monopoly on mail, to the renegade union members who brought the system—and the country—to a halt in the 1970s.


From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.
Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. One has only to look at history’s greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Máo zhuxí yulu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong)―which doesn’t include editions in 37 foreign languages and in braille―to appreciate the range and influence of a single publication, in paper. Or take the fact that one of history’s most revered artists, Leonardo da Vinci, left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. And though the colonies were at the time calling for a boycott of all British goods, the one exception they made speaks to the essentiality of the material; they penned the Declaration of Independence on British paper.
Now, amid discussion of “going paperless”―and as speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society grows rampant―we’ve come to a world-historic juncture. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of “true knowledge,” replacing the need to exercise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper’s evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times.
24 illustrations

A masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created Americaexamines the surprising role of the postal service in our nation’s political, social, economic, and physical development. 

The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. government’s largest and most important endeavor—indeed, it was the government for most citizens. This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen—a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers. America’s uniquely democratic post powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the world’s information and communications superpower with astonishing speed. 

Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the post office as America’s own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail—then “the media”—imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices. The post was the catalyst of the nation’s transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, the consumer culture, and the political party system. Still one of the country’s two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, African Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life. 

Starved by two world wars and the Great Depression, confronted with the country’s increasingly anti-institutional mind-set, and struggling with its doubled mail volume, the post stumbled badly in the turbulent 1960s. Distracted by the ensuing modernization of its traditional services, however, it failed to transition from paper mail to email, which prescient observers saw as its logical next step. Now the post office is at a crossroads. Before deciding its future, Americans should understand what this grand yet overlooked institution has accomplished since 1775 and consider what it should and could contribute in the twenty-first century.

Gallagher argues that now, more than ever before, the imperiled post office deserves this effort, because just as the founders anticipated, it created forward-looking, communication-oriented, 

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

WOYWW 382 - Fiji Holiday 2016

Hello I am back, did you miss me?
I have been sick, busy and sick, yes I got really sick with the flu twice this year
that 4th strain of the flu they promised turned out to be really bad and I got to
test it out and boy it wasn't nice. Hopefully I am immune to it and built a stronger
system to cope with any in the future until it mutates again.

I have also been to Fiji in July since my last WOYWW I posted in June and had a 
wonderful time for a week. 
It was a mini family reunion with cousins and their kids from 
Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Scotland.
I will post photos at the end of this post so if you don't want to see them you can skip it 
after my desk photo. 


So my desk is filled with Wedding Invites I've been commissioned to do. Yes there was a start-stop-start to these as the wedding was originally for 2014 and was postponed. Now the wedding is definitely on and I am pulling out all stops to finish these off.

Each invite and thank you card is hand crafted and individually cut...no short cuts what so ever.

Joining up with Julia's Stamping Ground for more desk peeks.


Fiji Ah Sam Family Reunion 2016


This is the view looking out to sea

This was how close we were to the beach, we had our own private beach

Looking at the house from the beach

Open plan kitchen, with vaulted ceilings

We had a welcome part and farewell party by the staff. The owners Shaan (the purple tshirt) and Jess (striped top) are such a wonderful couple. The workers sang us welcome and farewell songs which was so beautiful to hear the harmonizing 
#villamokusigafiji 

We went to the Hideaway hotel and had cocktails (mocktails for me), they were $20 but well worth it, nowhere else have I tasted mocktails as wonderful as this. I call it a Tropical Fruit cocktail.

My daughter Keira and cousin Sharon enjoying the hammocks at the villa, I couldnt lie on them as they made me motion sick hahahaha


Fresh coconut to drink, so yummy and refreshing and so good for you

My cousins Debbie and Sharon and daughter Keira walked out onto the reef just in front of the villa and found this natural bar of coral

Thats the whole family reunion, I miss the kids, sadly I wont be able to see the Scotland nieces and nephews for a long time. probably when they are teenagers.
Thanks for a wonderful holiday left to right back row:
Darrell Chau, Keira Nicolls, Damien Hough, Me, Julia Chau, Debbie Venables-Hough
Front row:
Kiana Venables, Jett Hough, Jessica-Rhys-Joey Chau, Sharon Chau-Fairall
no
oh yes hubby wasn't there because he'd just come back from his 
USA holiday and had no more leave left

Mystery Postcard Received

I received this postcard and have no idea what its for. I dont have a contact to reply to.I have sent a search party out via Postcrossing but they can't locate it either.

So if this is your postcard or you know of this person please send me a message so I can thank you/her or register it.




Friday, September 16, 2016

Interesting reading - War and its innocent victims-9/11

Kim Phuc the Napalm girl of Vietnam and how Facebook took down the iconic photo that was posted in Norway

Tea bags and their many uses, and the downside to drinking some brands of tea

Flavour infused sea salt, always wanted to make my own as we use a lot of flavoured anything lol

On the 15th anniversary of that tragic day of 9/11, do you remember where you were?
it was 11pm that fateful night for me, I was living in Adelaide, South Australia, we had just come home from a meeting and I had gone to sleep. Husband got a phone call from a friend in Sydney-Celine who told him we had to turn on the tv. Hubby woke me up a few hours later after watching the news of the Twin Towers, i did not sleep for 2 days as I watched the television coverage of this life changing moment happening in the US.

About the Falling Man the most powerful image of 9/11

More stories about 9/11

Escape from the 81st floor of the World Trade Centre

Trump brags about his building being the tallest in Lower Manhattan

9/11 remembered

Handwritten notes from Air Force One on 9/11 

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