The letter reads as follows:

Dear Pacifica Customer Service:

For soy candles that are the most easily available in stores, I’m highly disappointed in their quality and frustrated that I keep buying your candles just because they are convenient. Out of the dozen or so that I have purchased, only two or three have burned cleanly and used all the wax instead of burrowing a hole in the middle, and those few needed constant attention to get them to burn correctly. I have tried other soy candles and they burned cleanly without prodding, so I know it can be done.

I want to give your candles another chance in the future, but first I wanted to make sure you know that they aren’t working and perhaps you will figure out what’s not working and fix it. I don’t know anything about candle-making, so for the meantime I’ll have to stick with candles ordered online that I know will burn cleanly. Your scents are amazing but even that is hard to tell when the flame is only burning through half the wax, since the scent throw is much narrower.

I worry that because your candles are so readily available people will get the wrong impression about soy candles in general: that they don’t burn cleanly and therefore are a poor substitute for paraffin wax candles. I hope you look into this and figure out if something in your process needs to be changed.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Stephanie

In the last few years of living in Minnesota, (or “Manysnowta” as my roommate and I have now dubbed it), I’ve begun to foster a deep appreciation for candles in the winter as a way to cheer up and warm yourself through (in addition to tea!). I try to avoid petroleum-based products as much as possible, which leads me to shun normal paraffin candles and opt for soy ones. Unfortunately, the most commonly found soy candles are Pacifica candles, and they’re not great. People used to their candles burning cleanly and willing to try these will probably go back to their paraffin-wax candles. Not the impression I want to send, as an environmentalist! And when I realized that I decided that it really is important to send Pacifica a letter conferring to them my disappointment.

As I mentioned in my letter, I have tried soy candles that burned cleanly as long as you burned them correctly. (Trim wick to 1/4″ before burning and burn for 1 hour for each inch diameter of the candle.) Becky turned me on to Soy Delites when she lived in Austin, and though they’re the only other soy candles I’ve ever tried I’m much happier with them than with Pacifica. The scents are a little more overpowering, but I’m going to overlook that right now and order them online since I’m really tired of my candles not burning cleanly.

Do you light candles in your home? Have you ever thought about using soy candles?

My last couple of mail days have been surprisingly full, despite my lack of sending anything out in almost a week. Obviously this makes it a goal for the day—to write some responses to the lovely people who have come into my life through a mutual adoration of the postal system. Once again I am gratified for them and happy with myself for keeping up with this new-old love for over a year now! Now that it has been over a year since my experience abroad in Vienna, Austria, the memories of which continually tug at me. I may not have the stationery I bought there, but I still have the Lamy Safari, as well as the desire to keep corresponding with people through thick and thin.

And now I think I will take some time to see what, exactly, came for me, again from the computer and with a clear mind focused on enjoying these little moments.

(By the way, I’m going for 20 sent pieces of mail this National Card and Letter Writing Month. Postcards count, and will probably be the bulk of the 20, though I’m really trying to get back into letter-writing. There’s a table in my sidebar with a count of how well I’m doing so far!)

The drawer in which I store my stationery and mail had in the last few months become fairly chaotic, and I’ve been meaning to take a few minutes to sort it out, but I haven’t been sure how exactly to do so. So I started by taking everything out and figuring out how to put it all back together. What was I going to do to keep the mail and the stationery separate without having to buy folders? And how would folders help anyway? These weren’t uniform pieces of paper that stack easily.

A recent bout of shoe shopping and a hatred of throwing boxes away clued me in: didn’t people used to store letters in shoeboxes? Under the bed? Why can’t I do the same?

Ta-da! Perfect solution. Now the mail drawer can be just the stationery drawer:

Now I have easy access to stationery again so I don’t have to forgo it for plain paper (which, actually, I like just as much lately, but I’ve been feeling locked out of my stationery because I couldn’t get to it, the way it was). Maybe over the weekend I’ll even bring back a new stationery set so I have some kick in the variety.

Why’s that, you ask? Well, because I’m flying home for the weekend. ;) For an extremely luxurious reason in fact. Much as I can’t wait for the event that I’m going home for, I am really really really glad I’ll be able to see my dad, my brother, my mom, and of course my darling babies:

It’s been too long since I’ve seen them.

But hey, at least my postcard/card wall has grown since it was founded:

Have a great weekend! Happy Friday posts will come back next week. :)

Everything that used to be fun for me is now turning into a chore, which is why I’ve been quiet around the Internet lately. I don’t know what’s fun anymore. I’m kind of going numb to life, wishing I were hibernating. I guess it’s all these “To do’s” that I’m scared of. They all are about growing up and turning into an adult, and that’s something I’m not quite ready to be yet.

So let’s put a little more spring in my step. April is National Card and Letter Writing Month, and after The Missive Maven’s March Madness goal of writing 100 letters by April 1, I’m ready to pick up a similar challenge. But what is a reasonable goal for me? 5 letters this month? 10? 15? I can’t decide on a specific number because they all seem so low and boring, but those would all be challenges for me. Doable? Who knows?

Today is Easter Sunday. Do you know what your April letter-writing goal is?

Speaking of writing, when was the last time you thought about writing thank-you cards? Was it that time, just after Christmas, where you threw a fit when your mother reminded you for the umpteenth time that you have to write thank-you cards for all the presents you got, but you didn’t like the presents you got so you didn’t want to thank whoever gave you them? Or was it when you last applied for a job, and sent along a note thanking the interviewer for giving you a chance, as many people recommend you do? Neither? Both?

To be sure, writing thank-you cards has possibly become more of a lost art than letter-writing, as I have yet to come across a “thank-you cards” blog, but I have come across multitudes of letter-writing ones. Letter-writing is re-surging in the public interest, but thank-you cards remain something only talked about when Emily Post is brought up.

To which I say: No more! Let’s talk about writing thank-you letters. Hey, let’s talk about telling people thank-you, from your heart! What I find wanting in the age of mass communication is not a lack of communication, but a lack of honest communication. It seems to me that I only talk about important things in my classes, and then I talk about them intellectually rather than passionately. I want to talk passionately more often, with more people. I want to have a Meeting of the Minds about how I feel about stewarding the Earth over a cup of hot chocolate at a local café. I want to talk about art and creativity, and how they make you feel more alive. I want to talk about what’s in your heart.

And I want to make absolutely sure those people that do kind things for me know how much I appreciate it.

Which is why I keep a variety of blank note-cards on hand: whenever I receive a gift, or experience someone’s kindness, I like to make sure I have my cards on-hand so that I can write while I’m still feeling the initial awe and gratitude. I find that I don’t want to write a thank-you note if I have to lay out money for a new card each time, and if I have cards already I’m still so excited about the receipt of a gift that I really, really want to just write it out. Then it’s done already, without fuss and with real excitement.

Part of me wonders if my partiality to thank-you cards comes from my time spent in Vienna, a city where the people are readily characterized as “very well-mannered”. While my professors certainly acted with a degree of manners to which I am not at all used to (as a rude American), there was one event in which a couple of strangers did the kindest things for me, simply because they were asked to. I couldn’t fathom their generosity. I wanted so badly to make sure they knew how much I appreciated it, and I bought a thank-you card right away and sent it off. I’m still not sure if it was received, but I hope they know that they contributed greatly to my good impression of a certain landmark and architect in Vienna.

Because of the Viennese rubbing off on me, and my own desire to make people feel appreciated, blank cards for thank-you notes are an important tool in my arsenal of stationery. They may not be used extremely often, but they are there for the times when I realize I need them, and I hope I have convinced you as well of their utility.

Remember to enter Becky’s giveaway! Enough entries and I might host one of my own.

I made a few postcards last week for the people who requested them, but there’s still time to request (see this post). I mean, I just bought bunches of new postcards, too. The Postcard Collection Continues!

So you might not even get views of places I’ve been: you might get cats or drawings inspired by life in Japan. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I order you to request a postcard from me!

I might even decorate the front.

I’m sure you could use some fun in your mailbox, and I have a postcard collection to get rid of. So what do you think? Want a postcard now? ;)