Wow, really considering shutting off access to Promos4Digis mail group - 140 emails downloaded just about every time I log on UK time on a Monday morning, from the weekend push. With that much, I don’t read any of them. Hardly promoting, more infuriating.

 In my credit card crunch, as an old card with fraudulent activity on it is being replaced with a new one, I’m not paying my bills properly also. But I managed to try out the new one over Paypal yesterday, and hey - I’ve bought up some new digistash. I’m saving it up for the next week, when I’m off the writing project, and can finally relax back into a bit more hands-on digiwork, and catch up with some scrapbooking - still don’t have that camera fixed. I’m kind of hoping now that the birthday bunny will hop along in June and give me a new one, a little one which can fit in my pocket but take decent shots at high resolution to work with. I really miss that camera, but there’s no way around here to get it fixed.

Back to emails, though. My gmail address is getting some hefty spam lately also. With writing, I don’t check emails and websites for days on end - it cuts into my precious writing time, and when you’re writing a novel, your head is just too swimming with it to put anything much else in. But I cleaned out gmail this morning before starting my writing for the day - and in the twenty spam items I checked to delete, I found one telling me that someone with an Indian sounding name would be pleased to provide me with my pizza boxes from now on.

 I live in a small village in the English countryside. The nearest supermarket is twenty minutes drive away to our local market town. And although locally we do have deliveries of some decent curries, and can pickup fish and chips and a reasonable chinese, the Pizza delivery options are non-existant. Even if they did deliver from the larger towns, the pizzas would be stone-cold by the time they got here.

Mmmmmm, pizza. It kind of got me thinking, though. When as a traditional scrapper, I subscribed to quite a few international and national scrapbook kit clubs, and the monthly kits of papers and embellishments arrived in pizza boxes, just the right size for 12x12 inch papers. I used to post off layouts in the same boxes. More lucrative kit companies had their own pizza boxes branded up with their logos and the like. Smaller companies sometimes used real pizza boxes, perhaps turned inside out so that the brand logo wasn’t confusing for the postman. Retail shops whom I had to order from online or over the phone - too distant from most of them - also sent me my chosen papers in pizza boxes also, but it’s the monthly kits which most remind me of the rush that a pizza box can give you - even if there’s no hawaaiin with extra pineapple in it.

I think that might be what I miss a little from my traditional paper-based scrapbooking days, but maybe I’m just a little reminiscent today for whatever reason. But nothing could beat the doorknock or coming home to see a new pizza box on the front porch, and the joy of opening it to see what was inside.

Digital seems to be more highly keyed to trends - not so long ago it was all about the surprise factor of the mystery bag digital items many retail online stores and designers provided on a monthly basis. Those mystery grab bags of unknown or hinted at  products inside the zip file are not around much anymore - but they were perhaps, briefly, the equivalent of the traditional pizza box.

Right now, as I contemplate a supremo vegetarian at 8:30 in the morning, I’ll leave you to go press the delete button on my spam-mail offer of pizza boxes - as many as my heart desires.