Postal Woes

[lydamorehouse]

 Yesterday, my postal carrier delivered two piece of mail to our house, neither of them actually addressed to us. One was to "current resident" at our address and the other "valued customer." 

We get a lot of spam mail, it's true. But, I have DOZENS of pen pals across the globe and so I'm used to seeing at least _one_ piece of personalized mail in the box, a utility bill at the very least.  

When I complained to Shawn about it this morning, she said, "Oh, yeah, wasn't there an article about this recently?" Apparently, there was! The Pioneer Press ran an article about mail delivery issues in St. Paul's east side. Shawn, who has subscribed to all of the neighborhood groups, said that she'd seen people complaining about slow mail delivery in other neighborhoods as well. 

I love getting mail.

I don't know what I'm going to do if we stop reliably getting mail.

I mean, I don't care if we get our bills--though I'm sure, given that we do NOT pay electronically, our services will care quite a bit more than I do, but what if I'm not getting the latest news from Austraila or Canada!??? !!! It's unbearable to think about! 

I understand that "snail mail" has become a thing of the past for a lot of people, but it's my hobby.  I enjoy getting paper letters and sending them. I guess I'm not worried about my mail going OUT. Shawn has long taken my letters to work, since she's downtown and the Minnesota Historical Society has a huge volume of mail that goes in and out. I still, however, occasionally leave letters out for my postal carrier to pick up, and now I'm wondering if that's wise?  

*sigh*

Comments

[minnehaha]

Like everyone who read this, I thought "Yeah, I should write more letters." I found an exciting large lot of highly useful rubber stamps on Minicon's mathom table, if one is interested in Mail Art. Perhaps I'll squeeze that into my busy days.

B. and I are great fans of mint scrap on our out-going mail, especially personal mail. Are you already using it, or would you like to hear more about it?

K.

[lydamorehouse]

I don't know what that is. I've never heard of it, so please tell me all about it.

[minnehaha]

You of course know that the whole world used to collect stamps and basically no one does any more. The follow-on effect is that stamp shops and stamp dealers can buy lots of stamp collections but have no one to sell them to. And thus stamps lose value. "Mint scrap" is un-cancelled postage sold below face value.

We once sent out our Xmas cards with stamps from the UN, because we bought the stamps as mint scrap at something like 70% off face value. The downside is that we had to get someone in NYC to take them to the post office inside the UN to mail them. But US postage is available on sites like eBay for less than face value. the more you can invest in it, the bigger the lot you can get, and the more you can save. Right now you can get $55 in usable stamps for about $38, for instance.

The fun for us is to look for lots with the smaller denominations and so be able to put lots of old stamps on outgoing mail. Our postman (non-gendered term) even asked where do we get all these old stamps?

Search eBay for "discount postage."

K.

[lydamorehouse]

Huh. That's cool!

I actually _do_ collect stamps (I never stopped). I think this means that I'm living in a completely different universe from most people. Which might not be as big a surprise than it ought to be.

[minnehaha]

B. does too. Although one can debate the "collect" versus "accumulate" positions.

K.

[naomikritzer]

I was giving an out-of-town friend advice on things to see in the Twin Cities and was reminded of the Lake Harriet Elf. Did you know the elf will write back to you if you leave him a note? If your full-sized pen pals are letting you down, you could try the elf.

[lydamorehouse]

....

I love you, Naomi. But I think you have a grave misunderstanding of why I write to pen pals. :-D