Stamp Rant Begone?

01.16.2006

Last week I was bitching and moaning about the stamp price rising, or not so much that it was rising, but that I managed to find out after I had mailed bills with the old postage applied. Well, it's now a week later and I haven't received any mail returned for insufficient postage. Normally I would think this was good, but there is a wrestling game I've been trying to get from California through CafePress for a little over a month now. I contacted their customer support and they were going to send another copy via 2nd day air mail. If they shipped it the day after they said, it should have gotten here Saturday. I know the mail doesn't run today due to MLK day, so now I'm waiting to see what shows up tomorrow.

I'm not holding out a lot of hope since I often (about once a month) find one of my neighbors mail in my mailbox. It's not beyond the realm of reason to think that my packages are getting routed to my neighbors. To be honest, there's no telling where some of them really end up. I mean, if I can get mail that's mine but addressed wrong, is it too much to ask to get it if the address is right?

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Stamp Rant

01.10.2006

First class postal rates jumped from 37 cents to 39 cents yesterday. 2 cents isn't a big deal. Any denomination of money where the primary concern is in pennies isn't that big of a deal these days (gone are the days of scrounging up $6.65 in loose change to order a pizza from Dominos). I have at least $17 in wrapped pennies that have been sitting on shelf for at least 3 years. I don't really care that the postal rates have gone up. My problem is that I didn't know about the rate increase until about 3 hours after I had dropped off 3 bills in the postbox with the measly 37 cent stamps on them.

First of all, the post office did a lousy job letting me, their valued customer, know of the impending rate increase. I haven't been watching the local news for the past umpteen days, so I don't know if they mentioned anything or not. Ditto for natinal news. Evidently, wrestling news websites don't rank postal rates on their radar. If anything, I should have at least gotten mail from the post office saying the rates were changing. If it weren't for going to the post office later yesterday to pick up a parcel and in that visit hearing everybody talk about having to get 2 cent stamps, I still wouldn't know the rates had changed.

When the rates for any other service I take advantage of change, they let me know in my monthly statement - such as my cable company politely telling me their rates were changing in December. They told me, I knew, I was prepared. The post office, they tell me nada.

On top of this, the way they print the stamps doesn't help. Much like when the rates went up last time, the new stamp (the generic one with the flag making me feel all patriotic) doesn't even have the price of the stamp on it. For the first 37 cent stamps, they just had an "F" on them, which everyone should know means 37 cents. I guess the new one has a hidden "G" somewhere (because "G" just has to be equivalent to 39 cents).

Just raise the price a nickel every 5 years and be done with it. For now I'm just waiing for my bills to be returned with the "Insufficient Postage" label stuck on them somewhere, all because I unknowingly tried to stiff the post office 6 cents.

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The World Is My Wal-Mart

01.09.2006

I've been an advocate of eBay for a while now. It's been a good alternative to going to various stores and hunting down things that they, being local, hillbilly-esque stores, don't have. Mostly I tend to get toys, DVDs, comic book paraphenalia, and gaming what-not through eBay. Back before Christmas, I ordered what turned out to pretty much be all of the components of the last version of Car Wars Since coming out in 2002, the game pretty much bombed and has been sitting on sales shelves waiting for the occasional collector (or rube) to come by and pick it up. Since starting my quest to complete my car wars collection last year, I though that in the interest of completeness, I would go ahead and try to pick up what elements of the 5th edition of Car Wars I could pick up. As luck would have it, I was able to get it all through one seller on eBay: Busy Bee (or Deanna in her emails).

I excitedly went to the post office this morning to find my Parcel from Busy Bee, all the way from Canada. It used to be that if I was lucky I would make a trip to South Huntsville, find a game I was interested in, maybe get 15% off, and then take it back home. The list price for all the Car wars paraphernalia in my order was $81.35 (and that's in 2002 dollars). My total for all of it through the auction, including shipping, was $49.00. So that's close to 40% off, including the shipping! From Canada! And that, my friends, is why I like the interweb. It brings the world to my stoop.

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Resolute

01.02.2006

Today is back to work day for the new year. Like a lot of people, I've got a list of resolutions I'm going to try to stick to. I'm usually pretty good at keeping to my resoultions, I think because I throw in some easy easy ones just to make me feel better.

My big thing this year is going to be trying to get more excercise. I did well with karate last year, and I'm even going to try to go to an extra night class now that I'm up to the intermediate level. The first half of last year I partook in some Yoga, which went well with karate, but the time and gas involved in going 30 miles to where I was taking Yoga got to be a little prohibative, especially when the gas prices went above $3/gallon there for a little while. I'm going to attempt to walk more this year. I remember I used to walk to and from school all the time, before being old enough to drive. Using Google Maps, I found out it was about a 2 mile trip between school and home. So, I may not be walking to school, but I've dug out and set up the treadmill and am now committed to trying to up my amount of walking. I'm going to start out easy, trying to go about 15 minutes per day, but my goal is to get back up to that 2 miles per day (or is it 4?).

I've also got a couple of projects around the house that I've resolved to get done, some of them have been hanging around since last June, so I need a little incentive to finish them up. If I'm not careful, I'm just going to dump everything I need to do under "resolutions".

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Love | Marriage | Work

12.23.2005

I know why all my friends (save one) are married. It makes life easier.

I will probably ever be the single guy in which ever group I'm inhabiting. I tend to like my singleness. I can do what I want, when I want, with social norms and local laws in mind. I chuckle when the guys at work all ask permission and synchronize schedules to go for a boys nite out, while I can just pretty much go whenever.

After being sick last week, and since the official office still isn't completely set up at work, I've been working from home this week. It works nice for me. I've got a list of things to get done for work, none of which need more input from anyone else. While working on my little bullet list on the laptop on the kitchen table, I can do other things that clutter up life: fill up and run the dishwasher, wash clothes, dog-sit for mom. None of these things is a full time job, none takes more than 10 minutes out of an hour - I timed going out with the dog and throwing the ball with him while he worked up "his business"; 8 minutes.

The married clique have someone to share those chores with. Granted, the amount of chores probably doubles since there's more people involved, especially if you start counting kids and adding their input/mess to those chores. I've noticed this more lately since the addition of shopping for the holidays has been added in, mainly becuase all of these spouses are out there shopping and slowing me down even more!

I know it's a phase. After this weekend everyone will get settled into their non-shopping mode again. Soon the office will be ready and I'll have to go back to my non-working-from-home way of doing chores. Maybe I can go back to not bitching as much, too? Or maybe I should get married and pawn off my washing on the missus.

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