Today was a day when I wondered. Lee and I went to get the mail. The mail app had said no packages were coming.
Don’t trust the mail email. Go to the website.
Wait
He opened the box. There with a couple of cards and junk mail was a large package. It was firmly wedged into the box. Why? I don’t know. Our gate was open. The letter carrier could have brought it up to the house.
But no. Cramming was the choice. Lee pulled and pulled. The mailbox moved but not the package. Eventually the mailbox and post separated with the box still firmly inside.
Damn.
After much tugging and surgerizing we got the box, which contained another box, out in pieces. I was quite relieved to discover the contents were intact: my treasured Dak Prescott bobble-head figurine along with my Dak jersey. I’m a football fool at the moment.
Go Cowboys.
Watching football keeps me out of trouble, at least. Otherwise I watch dogs. All seven were running around a few minutes ago.
We love our sandbox.
It entertains as I wish the pool people would show up. It’s becoming the imaginary pool of daydreams.
Nothing here but dogs.
Wait a Minute Here
When I went over to watch the dogs, I decided to sit by the pool. Um. Guess what? The dang letter carrier DID drop more stuff off, on the back porch! Three packages and magazines. When did those show up? Why did Dak have to get shoved in the box?
I’m hearing a lot of complaints about the service people have been receiving from the US Postal Service. Now, of course, some of it is related to the weather issues of last week, when people where I live didn’t get any mail at all for a week or so. The weather is a good excuse, but doesn’t cover issues people are having elsewhere.
Carlton thins this new yarn smells amazing, since it went all over the country before it got here.
My example isn’t of anything critical, except to me. I ordered the yarn to finish out the table runner I’m making for Lee on February 3. I got the notice it had shipped on February 7. When did it arrive, you ask? February 25! That’s almost three weeks. Usually things take 3-5 days…well, up until recently anyway. Since the end of last year, when the election thing happened and the higher-ups at the USPS started cutting services, it’s been hard to get mail.
Look up at the top, February 7. It really takes that long to get from Massachusetts to Texas? Did they use a mule train? If so, I’d like to go see the mules.
I’ve had more than one thing simply not show up at all. An order of Christmas stuff from Doterra came mid January, which did not help with gift giving. But that’s nothing. One of my friends has had very expensive medicine delayed. She was okay, but there are others, like diabetics, who’ve had crises due to medicine being delayed.
Our horse supplements were also delayed, which wasn’t funny, even though they aren’t technically “medicine.” I’m still waiting for my turmeric tablets to show up.
Lee reports some of our clients haven’t received their bills in a timely fashion, too. That means money is not coming in. How many other small businesses that rely on the mail for billing have been adversely affected by the mail slowdown? This article shares some other consequences.
We need to be able to rely on postal mail, even if many of us pay our bills and do other transactions online. You need to be able to order something and have a vague idea of when it will show up.
I just want to share how pretty my horse is…again. He looks extra Arabian in this photo.
It’s been pointed out to me that, back in the not-so-distant past we were used to waiting 3-5 weeks for packages, and that’s true. But, back them most people paid their bills by mail, and if you gave it a week or so, you’d be sure your payment arrived on time. And if you bill for services, you’d know that if you mailed the bill at a certain time of the month, recipients would have plenty of time to get the payment back to you on time.
That’s no longer true, and it concerns me greatly. I’m not alone, as the delays are annoying lawmakers as well.
Yesterday I wrote about all the letters I received in the late 70s and early 80s. I guess I was a better correspondent back then. Probably writing a letter was a great way to procrastinate all the reading I had to do during my endless years of higher education, because the minute I got out of grad school, the productivity ended.
For a while I would write Christmas letters and send cards, especially when my kids were little. And I did always write long letters to the kids’ grandmother in Ireland, since it was too expensive to phone them.
If I don’t mail things from now on, Angry Supergirl will glare at me. Actually, she’s glaring at me now, because I left her in a box for over a year.
But wow, I stink at mailing things to people these days, or at least I did for a decade or more.
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The Hermits' Rest 