going postal

empty
i’m not sure what i have done to offend the u.s. post office but it must have been something big. in the past week i have received two packages that were messed up in route to my house or office. the first package was a timex watch. this is the watch that i use while running. i bought it about four months ago and two weeks ago it died. i took it back to walmart (the evil empire where i bought this watch in a moment of weakness) and they gave me a box to place the watch in and mail to timex for a warranty repair. after a week i received a box with a brand new watch in it. unfortunately, during the postal process one of the buttons of the watch was continually pressed in and thus the battery was dead when i received the new watch. i called timex and they told me they would send me a new one which i received in working order yesterday.

the second package is a longer story. for pam’s birthday i order an autographed copy of a book from an author she likes. i figured it would be a great little gift. unfortunately, when the book arrived it wasn’t autographed. i called the company up and they said it was obviously their fault and they would correct it by sending out another book that was autographed. they mailed it and it arrived yesterday. when i picked up the package it felt a little lite. when i opened the envelope i realized what was wrong … the envelope was empty. since i can’t imagine a company mailing an empty envelope i prefer to blame the post office. i think that over the years all the increases in the price of a stamp have lead to a surplus of research money within the post office. the postal workers have used this money to developed a dematerializing laser that can go into an envelope and remove it’s contents without every opening the envelope. this way the post office can mess up the plans of husbands and make them look bad. this is part of the post office’s master plan to cause a revolution. if they tick off enough wives, by making the wives think ill of their husbands, they will eventually reach a critical mass of upset wives and a civil war will begin. married women all over the nation will go crazy and cause major destruction. this will cause people to forget the term “” and instead think that “going wival” is a better term for going crazy.

darn those postal workers and their cunning plans.

growing & going

within the households of our friends and our own it has become a tradition during the CHRISTmas season to write a “year in review” newsletter. pam and i always look forward to reading these. this year we’ve noticed a trend – some of our friends write nothing about themselves within their newsletters. they describe the changes that their kids have gone through but nothing of themselves. pam and i started talking about this and we are convinced that part of the reason for this may be that they have not changed any during the past year. their kids have grown and developed and thus need to be re-described to everyone. whenever someone grows they need to be “re-described” because they have changed. you can see this in the newsletters we enjoy the most. in these newsletters our friends describe themselves again because they have grown during the year. they have learned new things, developed within things that they were already a part of – they’ve grown.

of course, this probably isn’t true. these friends probably have grown and developed and they were just so excited about their kids that they forgot to mention it. i’m thankful for their newsletters because they remind me that i want to continue growing and developing throughout my life.