A Gold Watch

^(via)

Well, I have some news - bad, good and really good. I always go with the bad first... as some of you may know my mailbox was murdered beat up on Saturday night. I've mentioned before that I live on a street that runs adjacent to one of the main 'pub streets' in Newcastle and as a result on Wednesday (student night), Friday and Saturday nights there can be some unsavouries walking drunkenly down our street. Usually they're just funny to eavesdrop on and pose no threat, but on Saturday night there was scruffy, drunk shirtless guy wandering around smashing stuff up and screaming down our street and my mailbox was one of two known mailboxes he smashed. The mailbox itself is in reasonable shape but it will be hard to reattach. When it happened I found the whole thing pretty hilarious. I just did a blog post about my mail box and I probably get more mail than anyone in the street, and out of all of the mailboxes he chose mine to knock off. The mailbox murderer looked pretty wrecked and kept coming back to our gate and trying to open it at about 3 in the morning. It felt kind of melodramatic to do so, but we called the police and eventually they sent someone to patrol the street. As I couldn't reattach the mail box I just sat it on our front step this morning so the mail man could see and when he stopped a few minutes ago C ran out to make sure he could see it and told him the mailbox had been smashed off. The only thing he said was "You better get it put back on 'cos youse get a lot of mail" and drove off. Anyway, all is well because I got my mail today and I'll work on reattaching my poor beat up red mailbox.


^ C brought it back inside to save it from any further harm.

Want to hear the good news? My friend Manneh moved into our spare room yesterday and it's been so fun having him here so far. He has something to contribute to my blog today - a rather interesting conversation he had with somebody he's never met on Facebook. Emmanuel is Manneh's real name. Basically, this guy started chatting Manneh up, thinking he was a girl and Manneh went along with it...


:P

And now, for some extra special news... this morning over my marmalade toast and hot chocolate I drew the winner of the 100 Followers Giveaway. I reread through all 85 of the entries and some of the 'dinner party' lists were so good. Thank you so much to everyone who entered. It would have been really hard to choose a winner myself, so I was glad that the random number generator could make the hard decision for me, and it chose a very worthy recipient;

♡ Garci from Chandlerguera



And I think I'd love to be present at her dinner party. I wish I had a bunch of stuff to giveaway, I'd send every person who entered something! I'd love to share some of my favourite dinner party entries sometime. Here's a couple I'd especially like to be present at (really I'd come to any of them);



This giveaway has finished up but I'll be announcing a belated Valentines Day giveaway of a book I rather like this week.

Sent mail;


^ This decorated Ava Gardner magazine page envelope is travelling to Chelsea.


^ A handmade envelope from 'The Dracula Collection' for Milly. I love that the envelope looks normal from the front and then creepy once you turn it over.

Received mail;


^ A sweet little letter from Tejal.


^ And a gorgeous, unexpected postcard from Micaela.

Missive Maven recently did an ode to her letter opener post and a friend sent me the link to this great post at Design*Sponge featuring letter openers that I thought I'd share;


Have a good day!