A Postcard A Day - Friday 31 July 2026 - Friday Smiles (and a little cat face for Friday Face-off)

 Hello lovely peeps, I'm going to show you what made me smile this weeK. Well, a lot of things have made me smile, but I haven't taken photos of everything.

I did get a postcard from Japan with ice cream on it.

It was sent by Hisane, who was also a palliative care nurse (like me) and said she used to give her patients ice cream.

She has used many stamps, all with an animal on it.

I'm going to write something about each stamp. If you are not interested, please just scroll down. I have some funnies at the end.

Top left, the orange stamp features a dog, and celebrated the Year of the Dog. 

 1969 First Day Cover YEAR OF THE DOG:

The stamp next to it  shows a tiger:

1998: Year of the Tiger: January 28, 1998 – February 15, 1999 (Earth Tiger)

Then underneath is another tiger.

1986:Another Year of the Tiger: February 9, 1986 – January 28, 1987 (Fire Tiger)

Here is the pretty First Day Cover:

Japan Post Co. announced on Jan. 28 that it will issue limited-edition 1-yen stamps based on a design using the company's "cute" character "Posukuma" from April 14, 2021.

Posukuma is the cuddly bear mascot of Japan Post — the post office for Japan.  This is a Japanese children's picture book highlighting the day-to-day of Posukuma, who loves honey toast and delivering handwritten letters! 

Below is a definitive 2 yen stamp released on February 2, 2015. 

It features an Ezo snow rabbit designed by  Kaifuchi Junko.

Below an lovely First Day Cover:

Phew, that were a lot of stamps. 

Let's go to something else. I was looking through the photos of my recent visit to Istanbul and I found this photo of a girl's bag. It made me smile.

She was waiting at the pedestrian crossing in front of me and I saw her bag.

Another thing that makes me smile is my cleaner. She comes once a week and cleans my little flat in a couple of hours. She does a really good job:

My cat Ronnie is an older cat and not really into toys. I have a drawer with cat toys and every now and then I will get something out to see if I can tempt him with something to play with:

Like this tunnel. He was very cautiously exploring and then popped in.

I think he was a little surprised when he found a 'window':

It's Thursday evening and I am going to get ready for the annual charity walk through the village. Of course it happens at night as during the day it will be too hot to walk. I'll be home around midnight, so photos Tuesday or next Friday.

That is all from me today. 

I will leave you with some funnies at the end. 

For now I will say: Keep smiling!

Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 28 July 2026 - T for a meal, a turtle and a cat bag

 Hello lovely peeps,

Here we are again at the beginning of the week. How time flies! 

I have a lovely postcard to show you today, and some drinks for Elizabeth and Bluebeard's T-Party.

And did I tell you I love turtles?....

Let me show you my postcard:

It was sent to me by someone in Indianapolis, who forgot to put his name on the card. It shows a turtle, an endangered honu Hawaiian green sea turtle. 

(Scientific name: Chelonia mydas.) 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website writes this:

Honu are a migratory species, traveling hundreds or thousands of miles from foraging areas to nesting beaches. Over 95% of the Hawaiian Green sea turtle population nests in French Frigate Shoals in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. They largely travel to the main Hawaiian Islands to forage for food and bask on the beaches. Limited nesting and foraging occurs in other locations in the Pacific such as America Samoa, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. When they are not migrating, honu remain in shallow waters like lagoons, reefs, bays, and shoals to feed and nest along open, undisturbed beaches. 

Green sea turtles are also found throughout the world.  Other genetically distinct populations range all over the Pacific, the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts of North and South America, the Mediterranean Sea, and northern parts of the Indian Ocean. But the Hawaiian Green sea turtle exists only in Hawaiian archipelago.

Hatchling honu eat a diet of fish and plants, but then switch to a mostly herbivorous diet of algae and seagrass between ages 5 and 7.  Less frequently, juveniles and adults may eat invertebrates like sponges and jellyfish.

 Their lifespan is estimated to be 60 to 70 years, but honu do not reach sexual maturity until 25 to 40 years!  And the length of reproductivity varies: ranging from 17 to 23 years.  

Once a female can reproduce, she will return to her nesting site every 2 to 5 years and lay anywhere between 3 and 9 clutches.  Each clutch varies between 75 to 200 eggs, with an interval of about 12 days between each clutch.  After months of laying eggs, she returns to the sea to forage. Depending on the temperatures, the eggs may hatch after 45 to 75 days; and the hatchlings emerge usually at night to travel toward the brightest horizon: the ocean.

The stamps are really cool:

The stamp on the left features a humming bird. For us Europeans this is a real treat as we don't have them in Europe. The middle stamp carries on with the ocean theme: it's a manatee. Also unknown in Europe as far as I know. 

Wikipedia writes:

Manatees (family Trichechidae, genus Trichechus) are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. There are three accepted living species of Trichechidae, representing three of the four living species in the order Sirenia: the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis), the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus), and the West African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis). They measure up to 4.0 metres (13 ft 1 in) long, weigh as much as 590 kilograms (1,300 lb), and have paddle-like tails.

Manatees are herbivores and eat over 60 different freshwater and saltwater plants. Manatees inhabit the shallow, marshy coastal areas and rivers of the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the Amazon basin, and West Africa.

Amazing animals!

What have I been up to? Not much. In this heat I stay indoors. Summers here are boring as all my clubs and groups etc have stopped for the summer months. I do go to Pilates twice a week in the morning, but I don't have any photos of that to show you.

I do have a confession to make: I have succumbed to advertising and bought  (online) a handbag with a ginger cat on it.

The price was reasonable and I only realised after I pressed the button, that there was no delivery date. This usually means, the article comes from China and might take months to get here. Oh well, it will be a nice surprise when it does, as I will have completely forgotten about it.

On Saturday evenings I lead a group called Intercambio. It's a Spanish-English conversation group. We have all become friends and we regularly go out socially. 

There is a restaurant in our village that only opens in the summer. It is called Angela's Patio. 

The food is exceptionally good and we had booked a table (inside) last Saturday:

The roof opens up, so at night it is lovely. 

Below is a photo from the Internet.

Here is the menu (in English), as I know some people like to see it:

One of us ordered the dry aged 750 grams rib steak (not visible in the photo). It was enormous and we all got to sample a little bite (delicious).

I had pork shank (knuckle), which was simple but delicious. It fell apart and was actually too much for me to eat so I took some of the meat home and I had another meal on Sunday. 

Visible is my glass of white wine for Elizabeth and Bluebeard's T-Party. I could have had red wine (with meat) but I was so used to saying white wine, that I completely forgot.

Here we all are. You probably recognise them all by now, as I always go out with the same friends. (I'm the one with the black top.)

That's all from me this Tuesday,

Happy T-Day,

Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Friday 24 July 2026 - Friday Smiles

Hello lovely girls! Is the sun shining for you? Or are there clouds on the horizon? Remember, every cloud has a silver lining.

Let me show you a fun postcard that landed in my mailbox the other day:

It was sent to me by Nadia, who lives in a small village in France. She tells me she is off sick at the moment for depression. She has to go back to work and is dreading it. She has to work another 14 years before she can retire and that is making her even more depressed.

Nadia I feel for you. I have been in the same situation, only I was much closer to retirement age fortunately. 

The card is fun. It shows small children playing with water. On the back it says:"Why don't we stay as enthusiastic as small children?".

The stamp is one I have never seen:

It reads 'French inventions, le cinéma' and it comes from a series about French inventions. The WOPA, stamps and coins website writes:

On June 16, 2025, La Poste is issuing a collector's booklet of eight postage stamps on the theme of French inventions.

This booklet illustrates the theme of French inventions with eight inventions from among the hundreds listed in France. Whether they were precursors, pioneers, or patented inventors, these French geniuses made it possible for everyone today to have access to technologies or objects whose use has become commonplace:

The calculator: the Pascaline, by the famous polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).

The hot air balloon: an invention of the two brothers, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740-1810) and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier (1745-1799).

The folding umbrella: by Jean Marius, inventor of a "broken parasol-umbrella to be carried in one's pocket," protected by a patent signed by Louis XIV. 

The Sewing Machine: by Barthélémy Thimonnier (1793-1857).

Cinema: The animated film industry owes much to Etienne Jules Marey (1830-1904), a physician and physiologist. Working on the locomotion of humans and animals, he took rapid-fire snapshots on a single gelatin-bromide-coated glass plate using his camera gun, creating chronophotography.

Radio: The principle of electrical transmission between two distant points was invented by physicist Édouard Branly (1844-1940). 

The soundtrack: Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-1879), a typographer, invented a system that allowed acoustic vibrations to be engraved on lampblack-coated paper—in other words, the graphic trace of a sound. Forgotten in favor of Edison, this pioneer's voice was finally heard in 2008 (singing "Au clair de la lune") thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the U.S.A. His voice can be heard at http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3

The digital code: we owe it to Robert Carrière (1931-2007), an electronics engineer, inspired by a Popeye cartoon.

What has been happening here in Spain?

Well I continue to go to Pilates twice a week and do aquagym in the local swimming pool also twice a week in the evening. I have friends to lunch once a week and I go out with other friends over the weekend. That's my routine, and in summer it is so hot here that I stay in with the blinds down and the windows shut, not to let any hot air into the house.

I remember the hot summer of 1976 (in Europe) as my son was born in August of that year and it was the hottest I remember ever in the Netherlands.

It's nothing compared to this.

I had my nails done a few days ago:

We had a scare a few days ago when a farmer, who was working the land, accidentally hit (and damaged) a gas pipe.

The situacion was soon under control but gas supply had to be cut off in several towns. We don't have gas (only bottled gas) so I didn't notice it until I saw it on the news.

My lemon tree is doing well:

About six or seven mini lemons growing nicely.

And to finish off, a picture of Ronnie:

I had to take him to the vets this week as he wasn't well and the vet concluded he had an allergic reaction to something. So he's on steroids and I have to make sure I use cleaning products without bleach in it.

Time will tell....(he already seems much better).

I have put some funnies at the  end.

Enjoy your weekend,

Keep smiling!

Lisca