Why I Should Set Up a Go Fund Me

As I have mentioned in the past, I LOVE post offices. I can't explain why. My family teases me about my habit of taking mail directly there to send instead of leaving it in the mailbox. When I travel, I always try to find the local post office and send mail from it, even in Mexico, where I can pretty much count on whatever I send not actually reaching its final destination. I don't know what they do with the mail.

A few years ago when I went to France with a friend, the hotel we stayed at on the Left Bank was a few storefront doors down the street from the Post Office. I was in Paradise and Paris all at once. Each day I walked to the PO and mailed a post card. There was a self-service scale; just put the mail on it, no matter what the mail was, answer a few questions in French, and out came the required postage. Perfection!

When I lived in Sarasota, Florida, there was a post office in the Mennonite part of town; it was housed in a tiny wooden building, and all of the Mennonite women came there in their cloth bonnets and pastel home-made dresses.  They all knew each other, of course, and spent the time they waited in line chatting. Outside was a bulletin board filled with all sorts of things for sale, work needed, jobs available. I often went to that post office on my way to my daughters' school.  

One of my favorite short stories is Why I Live at the Post Office by Eudora Welty. I guess Sister's family doesn't feel the least bit sorry for her; after all, she CHOSE to live there, but a small part of me thinks What fun!!!



Now, why am I talking about the PO?

Because my husband says that no way are we paying over $700,000 for a house when we have a perfectly good house now, one that we have lived in for 26 years and have made just right for us, our two cats, and my yarn stash.  

But this new development is right ACROSS the road from the PO. I could walk there, every day if I wanted to, and I probably would.

                                    This:

is DIRECTLY across the road from this, our post office:

SO, faithful readers of this blog, I think I will set up a Go Fund Me account, and you can all donate all the money you can generously give, and when it amounts to north of $700,000, I will buy a house. And for your donation, you can visit, get a tour of the house you bought me, and BONUS!!! I will give you a guided tour of the post office.

You are GREAT!!!  I'll let you know as soon as I get the fund set up and I thank you very much!

MOOOO

I passionately hate going to the grocery store more than is reasonable. The larger the store, the more I hate going there. I don't mind going to the Post Office, even though lately they have disappointed me with a package torn open (by, the PO says, sorting machinery) and delivered empty, and with a package sent to my Texas daughter, last MONDAY that is still not there a full week later, so go figure. I make no sense.

Back to the grocery store, figuratively. When I inevitably run out of milk---or food---I reluctantly haul myself to the store to restock.  And reward myself with a small bottle of chocolate milk.  I LOVE chocolate milk.  Good reward, right?

I love it so much that you would think I would go to the store more often.

Not if I can avoid it. But the Post Office? I know where everything is there and I love that it is open, 24 hours, and that it has a machine that lets me print labels and postage. Any time, day or night.  My kind of place. 

The grocery store?  Pfttttt.

YAY Post Office!!!

No, not because they explained to my satisfaction where my mail has been since October.

I didn't ask.

But I did go to the Post Office today to mail a package to younger daughter for her birthday---Happy Birthday S!

About 20 minutes after I left, I decided that I should charge my phone in the car. Uh....Where is the phone????

Back to the Post Office. I checked the counter where I would have left the phone/address book.

Nope.

So I jumped ahead of the line and asked the nice Postal Worker if anyone had turned in a cell phone. He said No and asked the other nice Postal Worker if he had seen it. He asked what color it was and I answered Pink.

He left and went into the back room, while the long line of customers waited. When he came back, he asked if the cover was only pink.

Nope, pink and white.

He handed me my phone and....I am not making this up....the people in line, who had been delayed because of my interruption---they CHEERED!!! And they APPLAUDED!!!

That, and getting my phone back, made my day. (But mostly getting my phone back.)

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

This arrived in my mailbox today:

It was postmarked, as you can see, on October 31, 2011.  Today is March 12, 2012.

Where has it been all of this time? Do the postal workers just leave these things sitting on shelves someplace?

I just called my friend, whose husband died in OCTOBER, to tell her what happened and to get the correct address for Hospice, a wonderful organization whose workers took such good care of Phil in his last month. She said that she had put the wrong address in the obituary but that everyone else had gotten their mail returned within days of sending it. Where this has been, I can't even guess.

And no, I haven't balanced the checkbook in a long time because everything is online, and I hadn't noticed that this check hadn't cleared, but still.....

Don't Believe I'da Told That

(title borrowed from Lewis Grizzard. More about that later.)

As I've mentioned before, I love the Post Office! Especially since they put in machines that let me address and print out postage on a label for packages when the PO isn't even open.

On Monday night I went to the Post Office to mail a package to younger daughter, who lives in LA. I put the package on the scale and entered her zip code into the computer. The computer said something along the lines of: that zip code does not exist.

Great. At home I had just entered the address into the address book feature of my iPhone and assumed I had the correct one. What to do? Oh, that's right. My address book is ALSO my phone!!!

I called yd, asked her for her correct zip code, entered it into the computer as we talked about other things, and then wrote the rest of the address on the label.

We were still talking when I finally gathered everything up to leave, but ......where was my phone???

OMG! How can I lose my phone when I have been standing in the same place for the past five minutes??? I rustled through my purse, checked the floor, and got more and more frustrated and puzzled. I kept saying to yd that I just couldn't understand how this had happened.

Yd: You can't find your phone?

Me: Yes, I can't find it and I just had it out in order to correct your zip code.

Yd: Uh, what are you talking to me on?

Oh, dear.

Now I understand what my brain was doing; the phone feature and the address book feature were two distinct and different features to me. My previous phone was just a .....phone. I made and received phone calls on it. No camera, no Internet, no address book, no e-mails, just phone calls.

My poor old brain has not adjusted to new technology.

At dinner last night, I told this story to dh. He stared at me for the longest time, and then said, I don't think I would have told you that story.

Well, I thought a significant other was the one person you could tell anything to (maybe not about the amount of stash you have, or the price of a pair of shoes). But really, anything.

Apparently not.

****************************************

So here's the Lewis Grizzard portion of the post. I met him ages ago at a book signing at a K-Mart of all places. I hadn't known that K-Mart sold books, and neither had anyone else apparently. Only I and two or three other people showed up. So we had a chance to chat, which was a treat, and I bought a book or two and a tape. Remember tapes?

The tape was titled Don't Believe I'da Told That. And here is one of the stories (the cleanest, I think) that was on the tape. Paraphrased, because it's been a long time:

Two men were sitting in the bleachers waiting for the start of a football game. They were drinking beer, chatting. One noticed a male dog, sitting down on the field, licking himself. The man watched for a moment and then said to his friend: I wish I could do that.

The friend looked at the dog and then replied: That dog would B..i..t..e.

The End

Obsessed Much?

I have written before about my thing with the Post Office, and now I am at it again. It will not surprise anyone in my family that this is how I spent today, the day after my two daughters and four grandchildren returned to their homes.

I have been packing up everything that needs to be shipped to each of them, but before you think that my children have early-onset forgetfulness, I will explain:

Because older daughter was flying by herself with her four children, ages 8, 6, 2, and nine months, she shipped a lot of clothes, stuffed animals, books and other necessities ahead of time. She had enough to handle in the airport with four children, backpacks and car seats without hauling all the luggage she needed. Because UPS destroyed the boxes, I have had to repack in new boxes and I hope they arrive in Texas in better shape than the originals arrived in here.

Younger daughter moved to Los Angeles almost three years ago, and left LOTS of things here even though she filled her car to the top with her belongings and also shipped many, many boxes to herself. While she was here this past week, she went through what she left behind and sorted out what to ship, donate, or toss. SHE would say that my ideal basement would have lots of sturdy shelving and nothing on them. (Actually, she's sort of mostly right.)

And so my predilection to get everything that's not mine out of the house and TO the post office post haste explains my activities today. If only the post office had been open, these would have been there already, but alas, they must wait till tomorrow.

Why I Should Live at the PO

Not by Eudora Welty
Because I've been to the freaking PO twice today!

If I had a brain, I'd be more organized and only go once.

OR, if I had the appropriate drugs, I wouldn't be so OCD that I am compelled to take things to the PO the moment they are ready to be mailed.

I was supposed to leave today for SAFF in Asheville, North Carolina, but I returned from Austin with a crummy bug and it's lingered and lingered. I'm enough better today to try and catch up with the week's errands, and---go to the PO twice. If I can get myself together, I can drive up tomorrow and join my friends there. A big if at this point, thanks to my lack of brains or drugs or both.