A Postcard A Day - Friday 23 February 2024 - Friday Smiles

 Hello lovely ladies, 

Have you had a good week? Have you had many smiles? I've had a quiet but lovely week. It's been sunny and warm and I've had to take it easy because of my back, so I've had a really nice week, relaxing in the sun with a drink and a good book. Smileworthy.

But first let me show you a postcard:

It's a painting by Edward Hopper who was born in Nyack, NY in 1882. He died in New York city in 1967. The painting is called "People In The Sun" (1960). It currently lives in the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC.

Self portrait:

The info on the back of the postcard reads:

"Fully clothed, silent and motionless, sun-worshippers sit in precisely staggered chairs, each person isolated from the next. The stillness of the scene, with its contrasting light and shadow, is cold and uninviting. Hopper's obsession with sunlight is the major theme in this work, as it was in all his later paintings, and he uses it to create jagged outlines and an oppressive atmosphere. Always pursuing the oddness of the mundane, Hopper's style was unaffected by contemporary European art movements or by American abstraction. His figures are anonymous and withdrawn, as if Hopper wanted to stress their sepateness from each other, rather than what has brought them together. One of North America's most popular artists, Hopper's work reveals the loneliness, the ugliness, the banality and also the unexpected beauty of the everyday world."

I quite like this painting, although I had not heard of this painter. Here are a few more of his works:

The stamps are pretty:

The large one is quite interesting:

In the summer of 2022, Deutsche Post called on young people between the ages of 14 and 18 to design a stamp on the theme of “Democracy”.

16-year-old Leonie Hansen's self-designed stamp shows a happily laughing globe in rainbow colors and a dove of peace

Winner of the stamp design competition for young people with the call “Set an example for democracy!”

900 young people took part in the competition and 21,000 people cast their votes in Deutsche Post's public online voting

Postal boss Tobias Meyer presents the first printed stamp and symbolic check to Leonie.

Now, what have I been up to? Because I have a bit of a back problem (muscular) I decided to not go to yoga, gym or Pilates this week, so I had a bit of a 'holiday'. The weather has been warm and sunny, so I have been enjoying the sun. I have also done a lot of reading. I have read three books in about ten days.

I read The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley.

The Paris Apartment is a thriller about a journalist who mysteriously disappeared while living in an odd apartment building in Paris. Jess, fleeing her life in England, makes her way to Paris to crash with her charming brother, Ben. Upon her arrival in Paris, Jess receives a mysterious voice message from Ben.

I enjoyed this mystery as it built up slowly and I kept guessing different scenarios and culprits. The end was quite unexpected.

I also read The Silent Girl by  Tess Gerritsen:

This one was another really good Tess Gerritsen thriller. (I've almost read them all) I like this author because she is a surgeon and she writes medically correct stuff. Also the author is Asian-American, so it was rather special that this story was set in Chinatown where Tess uses stories and legends that her grandparents used to tell her as a child.

The 'blurb' reads as follows:

“In Gerritsen’s gripping ninth Rizzoli & Isles novel (after Ice Cold), a severed hand found on a Chinatown street leads Det. Jane Rizzoli, Boston PD, to a rooftop, where she discovers a female body with a slit throat and without a hand. About the only clues to the Jane Doe’s identity are silvery hairs on the victim’s clothes that may not be human. Rizzoli and her team uncover a link to a 19-year-old murder/suicide case, in which an illegal immigrant cook, Wu Weimin, allegedly shot a waiter, three customers, and himself inside the Red Phoenix restaurant late one night. Some people in Chinatown still believe Wu was innocent. Meanwhile, in a strange coincidence, two missing girls turnout to be related to victims of the Red Phoenix massacre. Medical examiner Maura Isles plays a supporting role, though both women deal with personal and family issues that reveal their humanity and lend credibility to this deft thriller.”

The third book is Taken for Dead by Graham Masterton

This is the forth book in the series about Irish detective Katie Maguire. It's as gruesome as the previous ones, a very good thriller. Amazon writes:

In a secluded cove just outside the reaches of the city of Cork, a woman wakes up into a nightmare. She is buried in the sand, unable to escape. The gulls wheel silently overhead. Nobody could imagine the cruelty of her fate...

Katie Maguire of the Cork Garda is soon on the trail of a terrifying gang of torturers calling themselves the High Kings of Erin. She'll do anything to stop them before they can claim their next victim – but somehow they are always one step ahead.

Is Detective Katie Maguire losing her touch? Or is somebody close to her less trustworthy than they seem?

On Tuesday my friend Kim and I had our nails done and her husband Andy joined us for lunch/dinner. I had cooked a Thai green curry with king prawns:

And the dish was a success.

That's it from me today. Of course I will find a few funnies for you to have a smile about. I'm now off to Annie at A Stitch In Time.

Have a great weekend,

Keep smiling,

Lisca

.