Angela really liked this one-- she found it on Yahoo.

This cute creature is a Golden-mantled Tree-kangaroo. This species of tree kangaroo is native to forests of northern New Guinea. Tree kangaroos are marsupials belonging to the Macropod family. (via)

A young brown rat helps himself to the lunch of a 12-year-old African leopard named Sheena at the Santago Rare Leopard Project in Hertfordshire, England. Photos are by photography student Casey Gutteridge. Read the full story here.

via @cuteanimalblog

via @cuteanimalblog

This cute, cordial, baby frog was taken by Tara Carollo in the hand of her niece Julia. (via)

This cute baby cheetah is a rescued orphan from the Maasai Mara in Kenya. (via)

This is a cute story - via @lauralsweet

This is a cute Fulvous-faced Flycatcher Warbler, taken at Wuling Farm, Taiwan by John & Fish. See their Flickr page here.

This cute baby lamb is from The Daily Coyote, which chronicles the adventures of a former big city girl living in a small 300-person Wyoming town.

This baby giraffe is named Margaret Abigail. She was born February 17, 2008 and made her public debut May 6, 2009 at the Bronx Zoo. For more information and pictures, see this ZooBorns article.

These cute baby river otters are from SeaWorld in San Diego. For more cute zoo babies, see this San Diego news slideshow.

Here are my impressions of Twitter as compared to Facebook after a few weeks of learning. (Originally to my friend on Facebook.)

It's like Facebook, except you can only write on your own "wall", your profile must be less than 160 characters, there's no support for photos or videos or groups or SuperPoke or giving birthday gifts, they use text interrupting @, #, and RT symbols like Perl, and I follow 500 strangers instead of 50 friends.

But it offers an open API, has less "controversial" terms of use, produces a huge volume of content, is useful for business, and satisfies my strange desire to know when Shaq is stuck in LA traffic or what Lance Armstrong had for dinner.

Of course the best service is FriendFeed, but not enough people use it.

For more cute finger sized animals, see this page.

While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, "Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year's wages and the money given to the poor." And they rebuked her harshly. --Mark 14:3-5

Like the woman's critics, I am often overly concerned with being prudent. But sometimes God calls for radical action spurred by His heart and not my own calculation. The question I ask myself is: How can I break my alabaster jar before my Lord?

Pictured above is the final result. For the full instructions, see this article.

This looks like a fun project. Though, it might mean fewer jobs for human taggers.

by memimenam via this strange sofas photo post .

by jenprouty

by DoKo.

That looks like a tasty strawberry. By gwenturnerjuarez

If you'd like to see some higher resolution photos of some sample cards, check out our handsoncards Flickr page. Or you can view a slideshow of all the photos.

In addition to Flickr, we also joined Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. If you use any of these social networking sites, please follow us, become a fan , or subscribe.

Teddy is one of Brian's two Pomeranians. (He's not a stuffed animal.)

See more in Brian's Flickr slideshow.

We received an order from New Hampshire this morning. In the PayPal note, our customer kindly noted that New Hampshire doesn't charge sales tax. I had set up our store to charge a flat 7.75% California sales tax on all orders based upon my interpretation of this state publication, Are Your Internet Sales Taxable?. But after further research, I realized I only need to charge sales tax to customers in California. So I have now fixed this-- now only orders shipped to California addresses will be charged sales tax. All other orders won't include sales tax. If you have any problems, please let me know.

Here's a page listing some Bible verses appropriate for Valentine's Day. I especially like Proverbs 15:17:

A bowl of vegetables with someone you love is better than steak with someone you hate. (NLT)

I previously posted a cute bunny and a cute kitty. Here is a cute puppy. By Kailash Gyawali, via Cutecore.

Woo hoo! We got our first order from someone other than our parents on Monday. I think it was mainly a "thank you" for my Satchmo tutorial, but we'll take it. Years from now, when we take over Hallmark, we'll remember this day with fondness. Thank you, Joe!

I mentioned in a previous post that we are experimenting with different colored card stock. We tried a beige color card stock on our Panda card which seemed to be a success. However, we can only find it in 65 lb. cover, which seems to be too light.

We searched some more and ordered a metallic card stock by Petallics called "Autumn Hay". Our order was delivered a few days ago, and it looks really nice. It has a nice, almost iridescent shine to it, and the card stock is very stiff. It is rated at 98 lb. cover, but it has the metallic coating on both sides which makes it much stiffer. Scoring it with our Scor-it tool creates a pretty professional-looking score on the inside of the card.

Despite these positives, we had a couple of problems printing on it with our Phaser 8560DN solid ink printer. The first problem was, because the paper was so stiff, it got jammed when running through the duplexer. However, this is just an inconvenience because it just means we'll have to make two passes for each print. (It ran single-sided prints with no problem).

The second problem is more serious and we still haven't found a solution for this yet. Though the print comes out very nicely, the ink easily scrapes off due to the smooth metallic coating. From art class, I remember there was a kind of spray for charcoal and pastel drawings to hold it in place once the drawing was finished. So we headed to Michaels and got a pastel/charcoal/pencil fixative by Prismacolor. The bad news is, it didn't work. The ink ran, cracked, and generally got all muddled up.

So it's back to the drawing board. At least now I can use the fixative on my 3-foot heigh charcoal hand drawing from college.

Update:I sought the counsel of another Michaels sales associate and learned that I needed an acid-free spray. So I got some Krylon "Preserve It!" Digital Photo & Paper Protectant. It does not ruin the print like the charcoal fixtative did, and, after a few coats, it prevents the ink from scratching off. I'm still not sure if this will be a practical solution from a business standpoint, but at least we're making progress. Maybe we will find an even better solution down the road.

FREE SHIPPING!!! We are offering free shipping on all orders until January 31st. Just enter the code "FREESHIP" in the coupon box at checkout. Get some Valentine's Day cards early! =)

We got our order of cello bags yesterday. They're the kind with the fold-over sticky flap. Pretty professional looking, huh? The card in the bag is the Bundled Hearts Valentines Day card, part of our push to make a bunch of Valentines Day Cards before Valentines Day.

In keeping with the cute baby animal theme, here is a cute baby kitty. That's it... just shameless cuteness. I found it at the Cute Project.

In my marketing quest, I came across this cute bunny. Go to the original article for a bigger picture. I'd like to see if I get a trackback on the original article, but I'm not sure if I have to have something else set up for it... I guess we'll see. Update: I guess it didn't work... need to do some homework...

In other news, I also ordered some metallic speckled card stock online today. It's hard to tell exactly how it will look from the picture, but I hope it will be pretty nice. We'll try some test prints and hopefully can offer this as another paper option. If it works well, there are a number of other color options as well.

Today we also looked into plastic wrapping for individual cards. Angela's parents own a retail store and agreed to offer our cards at their store. This is a great opportunity for us. We just need to provide a simple packaging for the single card and envelope. We found some cello bags online. If you have any suggestions let us know.

I thought my original welcome message was a little dry, so I had Angela write her version instead. I think it has a little more expression, don't you think?

My old version:

Welcome to HandsOnCards.com. We're now open for business! Please take a look around and feel free to purchase any cards. Payment is made through the safe and easy PayPal system. For more information, visit our Frequently Asked Questions page. For more information about us, check out our About Us page. We're still adding new card designs and new features, so check back again soon. As always, we welcome any feedback, either via our blog, or email. Thanks for visiting!

Angela's new version:

Woo-hoo! We've officially "cut the tape" and welcome you to the grand opening of our new store . We are a husband and wife team (for now at least ) who put the two "skills" of artistic passion/joy and computer savvy into one and... ta da... HandsOnCards.com was born!

We're now open for business! Feel free to purchase lots of cards! Honestly, I think the cards look pretty good. My mom says that the actual cards look better than the website pictures. So... there you go... testimony from a biased source.

Most of the cards for our first print runs were for my mom's Christmas cards. I got everything printed out OK and was all set to hand deliver them to her when we drove up on Monday. But I forgot them at home on my couch! This is not the best way to start out a business! Thankfully, my mom was gracious. She said I could go ahead and send them out after Angela and I arrived home today. So if you got a late Christmas card from my parents, it was my fault that it was late. Sorry about that. I would give the cards to my mom for free, but I think she wants to pay me and support the business. If anyone you decide to order cards from us, I will be sure not to make the same mistake twice. (Though, I don't expect be hand-delivering most orders.)

Here is the inaugural post for our HandsOnCards.com blog! We got the website up a few days ago and now the blog is up and running as well. We're not open for business yet-- we hope to open our figurative doors in a couple weeks. We've been busy though... Angela has been busy drawing card designs. And we are making a number of test runs with the printer. I've opened a new bank account, and we just got our California Seller's Permit today! In the next few days I'll submit the applications for our city business license and ficticious business name and I'll set up PayPal with our shopping cart software and run tests. Of course, there is a lot more I need to do with the website, both with the content and the technical details. And we need to work on some marketing ideas to spread the word. So if you like what you see, pass the word along! There's a lot of work to do, but it's been fun so far. As always, we welcome any ideas or feedback-- leave a comment below or send an email using the contact page. Thanks for reading!