Postcard Update!
With February 29th fast approaching, birthday postcards have been arriving in increasing numbers. Here's a picture of the wall from before LTUE last week: 
Now here's a picture of the wall today. 
Yes, I read every one of these. Thank you for all the pleasant wishes and kind words. Thank you as well for the pictures that make me wish I was living in some of these gorgeous, distant lands. (Fortunately for the family budget, we got a postcard from Utah, and I realized that my current home ALSO looks really good in pictures.) It amused me to see some of these pictures accompanied by text like "it's not much, but it's home." I think we all tend to forget how beautiful the world around us really is. Over time the marvelous becomes the mundane, or as the Roman satirist Apuleius said, "familiarity breeds contempt." Except I think he said it in Latin.