Too pooped to post, snail mail rant, and the case of the missing wheels

Sorry, no picture today. Actually I forgot to take a pic during the intimate, but fun polymer clay class today where I had a few dedicated charges. Those who were there know they were there, and they have the bad jokes in their memories to prove it.  In all, it was a fun day and there was a lot of good claying going on, but after it all got put away and the dishes were done, I am pooped.

My schedule has been soooooooooo hectic this summer, I fear I have missed one or two deadlines for sales, and am going to be begging tomorrow to try to get in one of them.  Missing the deadline was due in part to this danged computer breakdown we had a couple of months back which lost all the emails and attachments.  I sort of remembered many of them and had haphazardly copied some of them manually into my date book, and others I had imprinted the show dates on my mind, but without my screensaver calendar (lost) and the email attachments for the applications, I have been in a dither trying to collect all the application forms etc.  So, I am going to spend much of tomorrow backtracking and contacting by email and phone to try to  get all the pieces back together. 

Now for the rant part.  (If you'd rather not read this, I give you persmisison to hit the exit key now.) I am getting really disgruntled with snail mail.  I have been waiting for so many things to arrive in the mail, and for things to get to people and places.  I fear that there is some WICKED FORCE out there committing subterfuge to prevent me from getting payments, sending checks and cheques, and all other sorts of mail-gone-bad stuff.  It's like there is NOBODY working in the post offices any more, and they've left all the work to malevolent little gremlins who live in the  boxes on the corner of the streets.  Seems those critters are eating up all the mail or at least the envelopes.  It's like they are on a gummy feast and they open the envelopes and party away by sucking all the gum/glue off the envelopes and then just leaving the interior bits, the stuff we the "mailors" are interested in, to fend for itself having no destinations and no return addresses.  And another thing they do, those dastardly gremlins, {and this thing I can attest to, not just surmise,} is that they wedge the envelopes in between the hardware that keeps the actual mailbox together, so that when the HUMAN BEING (aka Post Office Employee) comes to dump the mail into his big bag to take it to the post office, the wedged mail just stays put in the box.  For how long, I don't know, but I do know that I have seen with my own eyes, (and they don't lie...like my hips), I've seen the same piece of mail wedged in there on two consecutive days.  Don't those mail collectors ever LOOK inside the boxes?  Sounds like they need to take an advanced class in Mail Collection 302 where the syllabus reads 'How to really collect mail from those multicolored boxes'.  When the mail boxes were blandly colored worn-out-red, it never used to happen, the collectors collected the mail.  But now, now that the boxes have gone all colorful and decorated, I guess the collectors (who are being paid I bet, snicker, snicker,) are so taken by the chaotic and colorful decorations that they forget what the boxes are for.  Another tale of Just Another Pretty Face. 

And OH YAH!  Something I should have posted a while ago...The Sad Tale of the Missing Wheels.

Nearly a month ago, when we returned from our little hiatus/(I love that word except when it introduces hernia) busman's holiday, I espied a  nice bike attached to the Stop Sign very close to aforementioned prettily-decorated mail box.  It looked expensive...I dunno.  I am not a bike groupie.  But,  it was there one day.  It was there the next day.  And the third and oh, for at least a week. Maybe even longer since we were gone for about a week prior.  Even though I didn't mail something each day, I would see said Bike attached to the stop sign.  All shiny and tapioca colored; a Shimano I think it was...never looked that close.  And then, this week when I went to said mailbox, the bike was gone.  It wasn't until I looked down, while the divine Miss M (MOLLY NOT MIDDLER) was doing a dainty little curtsey aka pee, I saw it!!! The lock from the bike.  On the ground.  In two pieces.  One the curved part and the other close by, which someone had obviously hack-sawed off.  Guess they saw the bike there day after day as I did.

What I am wondering is this:  Did the person who locked up the bike in the first place FORGET about the bike?   Was he/she parking the bike there for some geocache search to do the rest of the search on foot?   Or, was it, heaven forbid, something sinister....Oh I don't want to go there.  Why was the bike there for over a week?  And who hack-sawed it off?  Perhaps it was the little gremilins from the mail box, who, having had one too many envelope frappés, decided to live outside the box and take off on the bike.  In any case, not a happy ending.  Except of course if it means that the gremlins didn't return to the mail box and the mail will go through from now on.