A short warning to start things off: yes, this is spam. Yes, this is a chain letter. But in the immortal words of the Google Toolbar: it’s not the usual yada yada. Two more things. One: spread this far, spread this wide, but please: not after February 18th 2004. Two: please act as soon as possible before the 18th. Why? Read on. And if you only want the long and short of this, scroll down to the last paragraph of this weblog entry.

My name is Michel Vuijlsteke, I live in Ghent (which is in Belgium), I’m thirty-three years old, I’ve been together with Sandra for over twelve years, we’re renovating our house, and we’ve got two children with a third due for, well, any day now.

I work in the internet industry, I’ve had a rafter of more or less regularly updated websites since the early nineties, and I’ve not missed a day blogging at Days of Drudgery and Boredom since at least September 2002.

And I’ve just broken my spinal column.

Quite literally: stairs collapsed, took a long fall, landed on my back, completely crushed two verterbræ, spent the eleven days since then in a hospital bed. In a smorgasbord of different kinds of pain and discomfort, but that’s not the point: I’m not looking for pity or asking for advice or money or anything like that. [Quick aside: I’ll gladly accept anything I get of course, principles’ll only go so far :)]

The point is that we’re expecting our third. It’s supposed to be born on February 22nd, but as anyone who’s ever had to deal with the timing of childbirth knows: what that actually means is that it could happen anywhere between today and two weeks.

And the actual point is that we haven’t got a card for it. I can handle the lay-out, the colours, the films for the printer, the text, in short everything but the illustrations. Can’t do those, and certainly not lying horizontally.

Our, erm, regular illustrator has no time to make us something, so we’re left in the lurch. And we really really would like to make our third birth announcement in the same style as the first two. Drawn in pencil, scanned and vectorized in black and white, and then further dealt with in a vector illustration package.

We’re thinking of a mouse theme, in tints of green. To be printed in three or four colours (not in CMYK). With, for instance, a mouse peeping out of its hole on the front cover, a sleeping mouse inside, and a piece of cheese on the back. That’s totally open for suggestions, of course.

To give you an idea of what the previous cards looked like (click for higher resolution, and sorry for the quality, I don’t have the source files handy):

In short: we’re looking for three illustrations of a mouse in the same style as the illustrations in the image above. For a birth announcement. For details on why, see above. We don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet, so either there should be two versions or the images should be applicable to both. We do know that the baby could be born literally any day now, so it’s quite urgent. Black and white drawings preferable, vector graphics if possible. Leave a link where we (well, actually, my family, I don’t have an internet connection at the hospital) can download. Reward: drinks on us whenever you’re in Ghent, and of course–eternal gratitude!