Fliyin’ high?

I have a love-hate relationship with the U.S. postal service.  I love our mail carrier, Merideth, even though the P.O. has made a bunch of really dumb changes that cause her to now work out of the Forsyth office, ten miles away, rather than the Rockaway Beach office, five miles away.  On the few occasions when I actually have to go to a post office, I always go to Rockaway.  Stacy, the former postmaster there, and I were on a first name basis for years, and I also have a good relationship with her replacement, Rose.  Rose doesn’t actually process our mail anymore – a sad thing – but when I call and say, “Hey, this is Patty in Walnut Shade and I’ve got a question,” she’s always happy to hear my voice and get me the information I need.  I’ve never been to the Forsyth post office; in fact, I don’t even know where it is.  But that’s where our mail comes from now, and that’s who I’m supposed to call if I have a problem.

Merideth is great, and for years she has gone out of her way to give us excellent service.  We appreciate that a lot!  One of the things she’s done for me a zillion times is to pick up my out-going packages.  We mail a lot of packages.  I’m a member of a book-swapping club, and I probably mail out a book every two or three weeks on average.  Then there are packages to a daughter in college and packages to a daughter on the mission field, and, as Rose told me the other day, our family is the second-biggest postal customer in Walnut Shade!

A few years back, the postal service made a rule that all packages bearing stamps and weighing over 13 ounces had to be mailed at a post office.  I thought that was a stupid rule, and I continued to put my stamped packages out in our box, and Merideth continued to pick them up.  We both just ignored the rule and, for as long as she worked out of Rockaway, everyone was happy.  The technical work-around was that the carrier was allowed to pick up such packages if she knew the sender.  Well, suffice it to say that Merideth knows our whole family very well!  She even brings Andrew Tootsie Pops!  No problem.

Until a couple weeks ago, when I put out a paperbackswap book that weighed a pound and half, or thereabouts, with stamps on it as always, and it came back the next day with a handwritten note from Merideth saying that since it was over 13 ounces, I’d have to take it to a post office, and if I had a problem I should call the Forsyth office – not the Rockaway Beach office.  I was steamed, not at Merideth, but at the stupid rule. I guess the “big city” office in Forsyth (population:  1716) is too big to accommodate good customers as well as the “little podunk” office in Rockaway (population:  588).

So, today, I had another such book to mail, and I was out and about, and I decided to hit the Hollister (population:  4051) post office.  I will say that after my experience there, I’m sticking with Rockaway form here on out, even though it’s five miles in the wrong direction on the way to nowhere.  Here’s my conversation between the postal clerk (we’ll call him PC) and me:

Me:  I need to mail this package.

PC:  Okay, let’s see.  (He weighs it.)

Me:  I was going to stamp it, but since it’s over 13 ounces, I had to bring it in.

PC:  That’ll be $2.89.  See, we’re saving you money.  (The pbs wrapper said $2.89 + $0.19 delivery confirmation, for a total of $3.08, the amount I was prepared to pay.)

Me:  Does that include the delivery confirmation fee?

PC:  Well, it looks like they already gave you that.

Me:  But it says I owe $3.08.

PC:  Hmmm. . . Well, lemme check.  (He eventually decides I should pay $3.08.  Duh.)

Me:  (handing him the cash)  I liked it a lot better when my carrier could pick up these packages.

PC:  Carriers can’t pick up stamped mail over 13 ounces.

Me:  Yes, I know that.  That’s why I brought it in.  I just wish that rule didn’t exist.

PC:  We didn’t make that rule.  It’s not a local rule, you know.  Aviation policy.

Me:  AVIATION?!?!?!?  My carrier doesn’t deliver my mail by PLANE!!!  (The guy behind me in line busts a gut laughing, but Mr. PC is all business.)

PC:  (getting a little huffy)  Madam, it’s aviation policy that all stamped mail over 13 ounces must be mailed at a post office.

I thanked him and left.  It is obvious to me that in a post office of any size larger than Rockaway Beach, the clerks never have any personality, much less a sense of humor.  I’m going to stay with Rockaway, where we still get to deal with real humans who aren’t afraid to crack a smile.

I wonder if Merideth has her pilot’s license.  It would give new meaning to “air mail.”

Stimulating

So, we are hearing more and more lately about our tax dollars at work to do things that no one wants or needs done.  The latest in this saga would be our new mile markers on Highway 65.

One day this week, I was tooling along north from Branson, headed home with some kid(s) in the van, when Jessica said, “Since when do we have mile markers every two-tenths of a mile?  And why do we need mile markers every two-tenths of a mile, anyway?”  I glanced at the shoulder, and sure enough, there was a marker every two-tenths of a mile.  I wondered aloud, “Now, do you think those are really new, or have they been here for ten years and I just never noticed them?”

There was neon hot pink paint around the base of each one, so we decided that they were indeed new, but the question of, “Why?” lingereth.  In exactly which scenario would it be vitally important to know that you were (for example) stranded, “at mile marker 119.4,” as opposed to, “between mile markers 119 and 120?”  Actually, if I were stranded and calling for help on 65 between 76 and 160, I’d say something like, “I’m about a mile north of F Highway,” or, “I’m stuck between F and Emory Creek,” or, “I’m just south of the 160 exit.”

Maybe the goal is to have a mile marker in sight and readable to any individual 20/20 vision at any given spot on along the highway, so that no one will have to think about where he is.  Maybe it’s to aid emergency vehicles.  In any case, if I could figure out how to research it, and if I were a gambling woman, I’d bet my health care reform benefits that those two-tenths of a mile markers are directly funded by our friendly neighborhood stimulus package.  I wonder which of our elected officials brought home THAT bacon to Missouri.

Comic relief in the mailbox

Andrew brought the mail in today, and in the stack was an over-sized envelope  from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Now, Mr. Kennedy and I are by no means on a first-name basis, so I was somewhat surprised to receive mail from him, addressed to me personally.  On the outside of the envelope, next to a photo of a polar bear climbing out of the sea onto an iceberg, were these words:

“Big oil companies and trophy hunters are now waging an attack on polar bears that Sarah Palin set in motion.  Sign the petition to save the polar bears.”

For some reason, that made me laugh.  So now Sarah Palin is attacking polar bears.  Sheesh.  Even if she is, is THAT supposed to make my blood boil?  Instead, it made me laugh.  Maybe it was because I daily find myself in a parenting struggle with a kid whose heart I am determined to wrestle for relentlessly while there is hope.  Maybe it’s because another child of ours has spent the past three-and-a-half months giving everything she has and then some to take the gospel to people on the other side of the world, some of whom have never before had the opportunity to hear that good news.  Maybe it’s just because I, who live about as Far to the Right as Mrs. Palin does, am so much more concerned about our nation’s OTHER left-leaning tendencies (nationalized banking, nationalized industry, nationalized health care, increased taxes, increased social spending, illegal immigration, less effective defense, all that money we owe China, homosexual marriage, abortion, spineless legislators, judicial activism – need I go on?) than I am about the Palin/polar bear war that this particular piece of junk mail just seems ridiculous!  In any case, that envelope made me laugh out loud.

Before tossing it unopened into File 13, I flipped it over.  On the back I was informed that the “N(ational) R(esources) D(efense) C(ouncil) has been awarded the 4-star top rating by www.charitynavigator.org and meets every standard of the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance.”  Below that, it says, “FREE Polar Bear S.O.S. Canvas Tote Bag.”

While I am truly thankful that I still live in a country where we are all free to give to the charity of our choice, I think I’ll stick to the church and those doing its work.  Bob, I’m going to pass on the polar bear tote, but thanks for the laugh.

I think I’ll pass.

STOP!

A few weeks ago, the Coffee Road street sign that has always stood in the corner of the Casa de Luz property next door mysteriously disappeared.  The base for the sign is still there, and a very small segment of the pole does remain, but it looks like it was sheared off a few inches above the base by an enormous beaver who gnawed it for a while and then gave it a violent twist.  I have been eagerly waiting for MODoT to replace that sign, as the little metal stub is unsightly in such a luxurious neighborhood as ours.  Ahem.

Next, as you know, that little pink MO “dot” appeared in our yard, along with some hot pink text in the street adjacent.  We, of course, had no clue what that was about.

Then, about a week ago, a (sign?) base appeared in OUR yard, at the location of the aforementioned pink dot.  Hmmm. . . maybe the Coffee Road sign was being moved to our yard.  Now, I didn’t much care for that possibility; I don’t even drink coffee.  But what can one do?  The recent August 3rd primary ballot emphatically did not seek my input on the positioning of replacement street signs in our fair county.

I walked this morning and then watered everything, arriving back inside about 8:15 AM.  30 minutes later, as I went to shower, Andrew hollered, “It’s a stop sign!!!”  He was looking out the boys’ bathroom window.  I had sent both boys in there to straighten up.  Josiah had cleaned that bathroom after supper last night and it looked neat and tidy.  This morning, it was a wreck again.  How DOES that happen so quickly?  So, while they were remedying the damage to the bathroom ambiance and decor, Andrew noticed that within the past half hour a stop sign had appeared on the base at the pink dot location in our yard.

We all wonder about our tax dollars at work on this one.  Coffee Road is a dirt road that tees into Highway 160 at our house.  We sit on the corner facing the highway.  I say it’s a dirt road, and usually it is, but sometimes it’s a mud road, and occasionally, when a neighbor buys a load of gravel (or lifts it out of the creek – shame, shame!) and spreads it in front of his house, I guess parts of Coffee Road could be considered a gravel road.

There are nine houses on Coffee Road, plus three houses on a side dirt-and-gravel road (Irene’s Lane – she evidently died before we moved here) that runs off of it over by the creek.  The restaurant is defunct – although we’ve heard that some businessman from India is buying it to re-open as a gas station and convenience store (yuck) – the trailer park is no more, and the sheet-metal-building-turned-automotive-repair has been vacant for years.  So, there’s not a great deal of traffic on Coffee Road.  Most of the folks who live here drive slowly on the road.  You have to if you value your suspension and front end alignment.  The only person who goes in and out of the neighborhood with haste is Mr. Ipock, who is a volunteer fireman and EMT type.  When his alarm goes off, he tears out of here like a bat out of hell, but I’m sure he’d do that whether there was a stop sign at the highway or not.  And frankly, if I were the one with the emergency, I’d want him to drive 45 mph down his dirt road, turn on his siren, and swerve violently into the highway ignoring the stop sign, too.

Putting a stop sign at the end of Coffee Road makes about as much sense as putting one at the end of YOUR driveway!  I’m already thinking about how I might spruce it up a bit.  Of course, it is technically installed on the highway easement, but shoot, we mow that strip of grass because it looks like it’s our yard.  In fact, my mailbox flower bed is on the easement, too.  Hmmm. . . I wonder if I might at least try a little bed of marigolds around the base of the stop sign next spring. . . ?  Or would the sheriff STOP me?   = )

The good, the bad, and the questionable

Good:  Prop C passed by a large margin.  Three cheers for Missouri voters refusing to be controlled by an irrational and un-American federal health insurance mandate!

Bad:  MO State Senator Jack Goodman, who was competing with seven other Republicans for the Republican nomination to Roy Blunt’s U.S. Congress seat, lost to Billy Long.  I hope Mr. Long does a good job, but I KNOW Mr. Goodman would have been an excellent Congressman.  He has served us so well in the State Senate, and he’s a man who is not afraid to stand for what is right.  I pray that he and his family will not give up and will continue to be able to represent us in the future.

Really Bad:  Incumbent Taney County Presiding Commissioner Chuck Pennel was defeated in his bid for re-election by 146 votes (out of 8264 total votes cast).  He lost to Ron Houseman 39.98% to 38.21%.  Life’ll be a bit less stressful for Chuck and his family now, but it’s a severe loss for Taney County.  We will miss his common sense, cheerful demeanor, and integrity – not to mention his eight-foot yellow sign by our flower bed.

Questionable:  Roy Blunt handily won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.  While I do believe Mr. Blunt to be a man of conservative Christian conviction, I am concerned that he may not stand as firm on some issues as I think he should.  I will continue to keep him (and all our government officials) in my prayers.

Election Day!

It’s 8:15 PM on primary election day in Missouri, and with 25% of the precincts reporting, our man Chuck Pennel (“Re-elect Chuck for Taney County Presiding Commissioner!”) was leading Ron Houseman by about 40 votes ten minutes ago.  Now, five minutes later, with 43% of the precincts reporting (although OUR precinct hasn’t shown up yet) Chuck is trailing Mr. Houseman by 45 votes.

Sadly, it also appears that Mr. Purgason may not be able to overcome Mr. Blunt’s name recognition in the race for U.S. Senator.

In the olden days, we stared at changing numbers on our TV screens.  Now we sit in front of our computers and hit the refresh button every few minutes.  Oh, the suspense!

Foretaste of five-day

This morning I drove Jessica to the Branson airport for her much-anticipated graduation gift trip to see her friend, Lori Ann, in Pennsylvania.   Having made five runs to the new airport in the past five weeks, I am getting pretty familiar with that jaunt, to the point that I know each and every point at which to down shift the van so as not to burn out its brakes.

On the road this morning, Jessica was writing a letter to her friend, Courtney, who is away serving on an AIM mission trip right now.  As we made the final climb to the airport, Jessica said, “Mom would you be able to address this and put it across the street so it will go out today?”  Of course.  See, when you send letters to people on AIM mission trips, you have to carefully calculate which mailing address to use and when to mail it, so that it will arrive at the given place before the team leaves that place.  They leave places every three or four days, and if mail addressed to them isn’t there before they leave, they never see it.  Jessica does operate with slightly more margin than a couple of other folks in our family, but I am sure that that letter really needed to go out in TODAY’s mail in order for Courtney to ever receive it.

Not only that, but our home group meets on Friday nights.  We generally have enough ladies present that we need to break into two prayer groups; occasionally three.  Obviously I know the requests for the ladies in my own group, but we are all fairly close and we all like to be praying for all of the other ladies.  Therefore, I ask the leaders of the other group(s) to email their own groups’ requests to me ASAP, and then I email the whole list out to all the ladies.  This works well, except that one (and now two) of the ladies in our group don’t have email.  We suspect that this falls into that interesting category called, “should be illegal,” but we work with the situation as cheerfully as possible.

Once I create the major email with all the requests, I print one copy to snail mail to my dear non-emailing friend (Mildred) and one copy to hand carry to my dear non-emailing neighbor (Jodi).  In a perfect world, I like to get Mildred’s copy out in Saturday’s mail, so that she will receive it on Monday.

Most days our mail runs around 10:00 -11:00 AM, and it’s earlier on Saturdays.  I normally put all the outgoing mail out in the box when I go out to walk around 6:30 AM.  However, if we put something out later in the morning, we sometimes find that Merideth has already come.  In that case, we put it in our neighbor’s box across the street, because she gets to them about 90 minutes after us.  So, what Jessica meant was, “please put this letter in an envelope, address and stamp it, and then, because it’s so late in the morning,” (already 10:20 at that point), “put it in the neighbor’s box so it will be sure to go out today.”

The kicker was that, with today expected to be very hot (mid-90s and humid - oh, give me a break, Danette), I chose to go out and do a bit of gardening first thing.  While doing that, the sprayer that I use to douse my tomatoes with bug-killer and fungicide suddenly broke, sending cascades of nasty-smelling stuff down my arms instead of all over the tomato foliage.  This was a problem, because I know good and well that on June 19, Wal-Mart is in the process of moving out its gardening inventory (and its swimsuits!) and moving in its next season’s supply of plastic pumpkins,  winter coats, and artificial Christmas trees.  Thanks to those vicious tomato hornworms, I use my sprayer every week or two throughout tomato season (which has admittedly gotten much shorter in recent years – but I do still have three apparently healthy plants along with the six diseased ones and three dead ones), and I knew that if I intended to buy a replacement sprayer this year, it would be today or never.

That’s why I went to Wal-Mart on the way home from the airport, and that’s why I was so late getting started on the prayer request email that it was noon when I had the print copy ready to go out, and Merideth had already come and gone both ways.  Sigh.  BTW, Wal-Mart has had a whole shelf of those sprayers for six weeks, but today there was only ONE left.  I bought it.

The post office is a mere five miles away, so I decided to head over there; fully aware that they are only open 7:30 AM to 10:00 AM on Saturdays, but hoping that if I dropped these two letters in the out-of-town slot (only Rockaway Beach and Walnut Shade are considered “local”), surely they would be picked up sometime Saturday, instead of Monday.

When I got to the post office and surveyed the slots and the pick-up times, I learned to my extreme disappointment that the final pick-up for Saturday is at 9:45 AM, so despite all my good intentions, given my having put pruning, weeding, and watering above typing, there was simply NO WAY for those letters to go out in Saturday’s mail.  Which means Mildred won’t get the prayer requests till Tuesday at the earliest, and Courtney may or may not get her letter from Jessica at all.

All that made me think about what it will be like when the good old U.S Postal Service eliminates Saturday delivery.  It has been rumored that this could occur on October 1, so those of you snail mailing me birthday greetings for my big semicentennial need to take note.  I, too, will clearly need to plan ahead a bit better than I do now.  Of course, improved planning is always in season, and I can at least be thankful that Our Uncle didn’t raise first class letter rates THIS May, as he did in the past few Mays.

Who cares?

This week, we elected two new members of the Branson school board.  I’ve been wondering how many is “we.”

The population of the Branson zip code is stated online to be 17,339.   Statewide, the number of registered voters divided by population is .71.  If we assume that same per cent holds true for Branson, we could calculate a potential of 12,311 registered voters in Branson.

Now, the Branson school district also covers quite a bit of outlying (non-Branson) real estate, including the territory of shady walnuts in which we live.  Since this is an unincorporated area and I don’t have any official way to calculate the number of registered voters around here, I will now pull a figure out of the air and add the totally made-up number of conservatively 1000 additional registered voters in Rockaway Beach, Merriam Woods, Bull Creek Village, Walnut Shade, and other areas of the county from which resident students would be assigned to attend Branson schools.

Given that “total” of 13,311 potential registered voters in the Branson school district, how many people do you think bothered to vote in this election?  Well, there were seven candidates on the ballot, with the top two winning the school board seats.  We were politely instructed to vote for “one or two candidates; any more and it will kick out your ballot.”  If we generously assume that everyone who voted actually voted for two candidates, we can take the total votes received by all seven candidates (2475) and divide by two to get the total number of voters – which we thus compute to be 1238.  Dividing this by our admittedly bogus registered voter number (13,311), we arrive at 9.3% of the REGISTERED VOTERS caring enough to go vote.  And bear in mind that April 6, 2010 was a lovely, sunny spring day.

Admittedly, school board elections are only a step or two up from dog catcher and ambulance district director (the latter of which we also voted on this week), but as such, they are one of the most local options we have for making our voices heard.  In this particular school board election, the first- and second-place candidates received 620 and 478 votes, respectively.  The third-place candidate received 439 votes, which means that a mere 40 voters out of 13,000 could have changed the election’s outcome.

If we don’t care enough to make a difference on matters that directly affect us right where we live and in situations where our paltry one vote really does count for something, what does that say for the prognosis of our democratic republican form of government?  We daily watch our rights, our responsibilities, and our money being hijacked by our elected officials in Washington.  Maybe if more of us had bothered to go vote back in the days when those folks were running for school board instead of for US Congress or President, things would be different.  Sigh.

One of the things that really galls me about this most recent election is that I made the effort to vote (as did Scott, Katie, and – for the very first time! – Jessica), even though I don’t have, never have had, and probably never will have any kids in the Branson schools!  I voted because I live here and because our tax dollars support that school district, whether I like it or not.

True confession:  I almost failed my citizenship test, because the day before the election, I realized that I had not done my homework, didn’t know who was running, didn’t know what they stood for, and had no idea who to vote for.  So I started calling around to my friends who DO have kids in Branson schools, thinking that they could advise me.  Several of those ladies did their own asking around and later called me back with their suggestions and comments, which I greatly appreciated.  However, on election eve, NONE of the people I called had already figured out who they were going to vote for, and some of them didn’t even know there was an election!  And these school board members set the standards and chart the course for educating thousands of kids in our area!!!

I guess I’d better climb down off my soapbox now.

I did tell the lady at the polling place that I was thankful to God that we lived in a country that still let us vote for our leaders.  She agreed, but we both wondered aloud how much longer that will continue to be the case.

Post script:  After I did the above calculations, I found this item on the Hometown Daily News <hometowndailynews.com> website: “Although Taney County Clerk Donna Nealy felt a 15% voter turnout was possible, she also knew a lower turnout was also a possibility. The latter turned out to be the case as just under 9% of County Voters made it to the polls in Tuesday’s Municipal Elections . . .” While I may be peeved at the apathy of my fellow citizens, I am pleased that my estimate was pretty close!

A sick feeling

The last time the national news made me feel exactly like this was that dreadful morning in November 1992 when I woke up to learn that Mr. Clinton had been elected.

Now our members of Congress and our president have given us full-scale socialized medicine, and the whole thing turns my stomach.   God have mercy on us.

How we spend our money

Or, maybe more accurately, how our money is spent.  I was reading some updates from our local state senator and representative and learned that 29% of Missouri’s annual expenditures is spent on education (~$3.7 billion) and 32% goes to SOCIAL SERVICES (~$4.1 billion)!!!

I must figure out a way to do something about this.