Something completely different...

.for my blog is trying out products and reporting on them. Paperless Post contacted me, praised my blog and its appearance (OK, I'm susceptible, all right?), and offered me free coin to try out the site and post about it by today. So, now it's today, and here I go.

Paperless Post is dedicated to flyers and invitations--announcements, if you will--for events. There are also cards, filed under occasions and events, and I had to bat around for a bit to determine this. I'm always rather dense about new sites, so it is to the credit of their interface that I managed to find my way around.

You get many choices in pleasant styles--nothing too edgy, nothing too stodgy--and different levels of formality. Attractive contemporary designs. You may feel decision fatigue setting in, so remember:  Perfection is the enemy of the good. I had a good time trying out different combinations.

I was able to assemble a pretty and unique card for my friend, and, thanks to the magic of multiple windows, able to send it to her in good time. The site also links up with your address book, so really I didn't need to have resorted to multiple windows. I have mixed feelings about this, but we've been trading convenience for privacy for years, so why balk here?

Thank you, Helen Chuchak, for sending this my way. It makes a good addition to the other options in my repertory.

They can be found at this URL

https://www.paperlesspost.com

The movies in my head

No really suitable photo for this post. This morning, for the first time since my husband's death, I got back to my old style of dreaming. To wit: longish, detailed, complicated but coherent plots, featuring a mixture of real people, celebrities, and previously unknown people, doing improbable or metaphorically interesting activities. Walter called them three-reelers, and I could always help him fall asleep by telling him a dream (or made-up dream) in a monotone. Or I could just share them and entertain him. Like the time I attended a book signing of George Clooney, who had just published a book of poetry entitled "I'm Just Like You, Only Cooler." George knew my writing buddy Judith Terzi. I couldn't find any pants that didn't have cat hair on them.

But back to our sheep. This morning I slept well and long enough, and woke retaining this dream. Excellent, I thought, stretching, Walter will love this. And then I realized that he was gone, and would never get to laugh and exclaim over this dream. And my dear friend and former analyst Meredith Mitchell had died in 2017. And I don't know anyone--anyone--who has the right combination of intimacy and psychological interest to appreciate this dream. This is the first time in literally 50 years that I've had nowhere to take a dream. I collapse a little bit inside, then a little more.

One of the many hard things about losing my beloved husband Walter is that I can no longer share new experiences or old memories. Inspired by my friend Diane Schifrin, who created a page on Pinterest for her late father, I have established such a page on Facebook. The URL below does not create a link, but you can paste it into your browser.

https://www.facebook.com/Walter-Would-Have-Liked-This-107536047325019/

If you like, visit to see what he used to like and might have liked now. You might like those things too.

Walter had been a photographer since his early 20s, when he took up photography to take advantage of the air-conditioned dark room at his Army base in Bixby, Arizona. He got a big kick out of the sillier composition errors, such as trees or fountains or flower arrangements growing out of people's heads.