Aye, Lassie

The Early TV Memories stamps I mentioned here some time ago are out and I've already started getting some of my painted envelopes back. I didn't do many, though. I did The Lone Ranger and Groucho because I wanted to do those two. I also did a Twilight Zone 'cause I think I'm supposed to send one to Tamara. I also did one for each of the two individual special postmarks I knew about, Lassie (shown above) and Red Skelton. As I was finishing them up, I found out about one for Dragnet as well. I sent all these envelopes off to get their postmarks. The three getting individually themed ones to the three different post offices doing them, and the others just in to get the Official First Day for the set. Lassie and Red Skelton are back, and I'm still waiting on the others. I just found out two more individual ones, for Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy. Now I have to figure out if I'm motivated enough to paint more envelopes.

Next year, the big stamp release I'm looking forward to is comics! Garfield, Dennis The Menace, Beetle Bailey, Archie, and Calvin & Hobbes! I KNOW I'll have no trouble drawing C&H envelopes. Probably most of the others will come out fairly easily as well.

More envelope art can be seen on my ComicSpace.

House Detectives

We're going looking at houses again on Sunday. We haven't absolutely lost this house, but if the people who offered a higher bid than we did follow through, that's it. So, back on the road hunting down a new place to buy.

On top of this, the realtor who has been helping us is backing out. We're looking in an area outside of her normal circle and making her cover a LOT of miles. And since we actually got defaulted to her by a realtor that we had recommended to us but wasn't available at that time, she has to give 20% of her commission to that other realtor. And the standard 50% to the company she works out of. So we're making her do a lot of work, spend a lot of money on travel, and would get very little in return. Plus, she has constantly felt bad that she didn't really know the areas we were looking in very well, so she couldn't tell us where amenities were or what the local market was like. So we have to find a new realtor.

Greene House Effect

One of the four finalists mentioned before came back on the market, so we have made a bid. None of the houses we looked at this past weekend were suitable. We still have plans to go look at more this coming weekend. Will that improve our chances with this one?