Should I shower today or plan a fictional vacation?
Should I take down the Christmas tree or pet the cat?
Life is so challenging.
Decision du jour: Which card is funnier??
A)
B)
I have fictional vacations to plan and cats to pet — help me move on with my day.
Why hide your abnormality under a dingy flannel sack? Love suffers enough in this disposable culture and I will not be a lemming — I will stand up for the odd, the fractured, the misfit, the offbeat, the freaks. I will stand up and say, I embrace the grotesque!
As long as they don’t smell like urine.
I can handle just about any disfigurement — emotional or physical — that sits next to me on the bus, but my achilles heel in my mad-dash for sainthood, is my keen sense of smell.
Damn my olfactory perception.
I don’t think John Merrick
smelled like urine, so we would probably have been great friends.
I made two new cards that celebrate this subject. Feel free to give them to the person in your life that needs to know they’re special.
If you have someone in your life that smells like urine, they would probably appreciate this card very much.
Congratulations, future St. Blankblank.
**Spoiler Alert** Zeichen Press triumphed over Twenty-Twelve.
At times, the year was a nail-biter: will 2012 take it’s boot off of Zeichen Press’s face?… Will 2012 stop hitting Zeichen Press with a folding chair?… Yes and YES.
And as Zeichen Press says adieu to this Year Of Pestilence, Zeichen Press welcomes Twenty-Thirteen — welcomes it the way a mother welcomes the news of another pregnancy. The gift of amnesia is powerful and we are grateful for it. 
I’m wrapping up the year, as usual, in Brainerd, Minnesota. The temperature is hovering around a balmy 0° and as the supplies dwindle to beer and bacon, we are considering sending the children to town for chocolate and dvd’s. And medical marijuana.
Stay tuned…
I welcome the extra-ordinary. In fact, I am hyper-vigilant and ever-watchful for signs of miraculous happenings.
I ate two pounds of filet mignon on Christmas Eve and I’m pretty sure that was a miracle. It felt like a miracle — béarnaise sauce drizzled over huge hunks of very rare cow flesh doesn’t happen every day.
I love Christmas Miracles, they are the most powerful kind of miracle — A change of heart is better than filet mignon and antlers growing out of a dog’s head is, perhaps, the most miraculous of all.
Jen did say I couldn’t make any more Christmas cards but I squeezed this one past her because she is a sucker for dogs and because I threw her computer in a snowbank.
It’s almost January and you know what that means: It’s time to wash my Smart Wool socks. And celebrate Christmas.
Jen told me I can’t write anymore Christmas or Chanukah cards. After I egged her face, I wrote a Get Well card:
The Christmas Tree lot shack doubled as a meth-lab and while I admire ingenuity and entrepreneurship, I like my Holiday Traditions to be more “cozy-by-the-fire” and less “mix-up-a-batch-in-the-tub.”
BUT THAT’S JUST ME.
The “lot” contained exactly eight trees but due to a Christmas Miracle, we found the perfect tree!
We only had to retie the tree back onto the car once. To be fair, cooking meth doesn’t really prepare a person for handling Christmas Trees.
My Jewish friends don’t have these stories and this saddens me, so I made them a card:
Thank you, Religion News Service, for appreciating the ho-ho-Holiday-humdrum-hole-filling. 
And thank you, Dinah the Cat, for understanding the true meaning of Christmas.
And you’re right, you should be in the new Christmas card.
Oh, No Coast Craft-o-Rama… You never let us down! 
The Midtown Market’s halls were decked and bedazzled with all things Holiday… And handmade goodness was traded for cold-hard-cash.
The Zeichen Press Empire is always draped in black fabric because black is slimming.
Here’s a new Christmas card/fantasy?:
The No Coast Craft-O-Rama is TODAY and tomorrow (December 4th and 5th) and Jen has been feverishly printing in preparation.
She must have been too busy to notice my new woodpile!
Come see all of the Holiday Goodies at the Midtown Global Market today — Jen will be giving out free hugs with every purchase!
Once Upon A Time, my sister got the stomach flu so bad. Poor thing… up in the middle of the night… every bit of food evacuating her body post-haste. Who knew the colon could churn and transform loose stool into clear liquid? Well, my brother found out when he sleep-stumbled into the bathroom and slipped and skated on the translucent trots that never made it into the toilet-bowl.
See? Analogy. Our gratitude just pours out of us! It’s almost like a medical condition.
To “give back”, we are hosting Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade!
Tune in!
**An Open Letter to Alexis Stewart:
Dear Alexis Stewart,
If you want to be friends with me, just ask. You don’t need to buy all of your Christmas and birthday AND Mother’s Day cards from me.
Friends Forever,
Fran
—
Whew! I’m glad I got that out of the way! Thanks to Mail Chimp, our email-blast campaign was full of success.
Wanna know what Mother’s Day card Martha Stewart is getting in 2016???
I’LL NEVER TELL!!!
Does my IQ have to be higher to understand Sci-Fi films?? 
As the credits rolled for Interstellar, I whispered, to myself, “whaaat???” Maybe I should have taken 100 classes to prep me? All of that technlogy and time-talk made me wish I was working on the new Zeichen Press catalog that Jen so agressively marked-up.
I’LL GET TO IT. As soon as I finish rewatching Mad Men.
And while I’m (not) doing that, The Intern
is gallivanting about in Italy like some sort of hippie. Well, let’s just see if you have a studio to come home to. (OMG, I’M KIDDING. Please come home. And bring us souvenirs.)
“WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT??”
~Fran Shea
These cards stopped me right in my (dog) poop-covered tracks:
Let’s be friends, Emily McDowell.
Too needy?
Dinah always makes such a big deal about choosing paper and envelope color for a new release.
First, she has Jen print a card:
And then she does this:
She is such a taskmaster.
Greeting cards would be better if they were huge. And I could wipe my feet on them.
And what better way to spread the Good Word of Zeichen Press than by emblazoning it upon the doormat of every doorstep for every home throughout the land?
High Cotton makes lots of things, for lots of people. And now they will make doormats for us. I mean, for you. They’ll make doormats for you. Designed by us.
…El Niño. I know I’m supposed to be cursing Climate Change… I KNOW.
But how can I curse when meteorologists are predicting a warmer-than-usual winter??
I must embrace the phenomenon the way a mother embraces her wayward son.
IN OTHER NEWS, Jen and I chose 12 cards for the next release using darts, a cardboard cutout of Steve Buscemi, and our first-aid kit.
Here’s a teaser:
And because I always plan ahead, here’s a new Father’s Day card: