B365V2.1 - Will Christmas ever come?

Hey kids, no I didn't forget about this place just taking some well earned me time from writing.  Also I spent some time jiggering around in ye olde cranium, trying to determine just how I wanted to approach blogging going forward. 

Having thought about the last 12 months and reflecting on the overall effort I gave the whole 365 thing, if I were grading it I would say maybe B- or C+.  Obviously I didn't hit the goal of 365 distinct entries, though putting out 340 over the last year isn't too shabby.  There were also times where I felt like I was going through the motions, not blogging because I wanted or needed too but simply because I had too in order to make up some arbitrary goal I put upon myself.  Problem is, while those type of deadlines do generate content, it is shallow content for the reader and pretty much unfulfilling content for the writer (me). 

That being said, towards the end of the project (and the fact I mentally call it a project is troublesome to me, it infers more work than enjoyment but that is another matter) I started finding my voice, even as I was blogging less frequently.  That voice I lost a couple of years ago started rearing its ugly head again, and that is a good thing for me, even if it means I come off on the page as harsher sometimes.  News flash bulletin, sometimes I can be harsher, it's just who I am.  Like I have said here many times before, I am far more sinner than saint.  There are times when things just piss me off and I swear more often than not.  Last I checked there was a content warning on the page, so I am cool with that. 

Going forward I did kind of like the Blogger 365 name, so for my regular entries I am keeping it, though in the abbreviated fashion of B365.  Of course V2 is simply the fact that this would be version two, slightly altered from version one in that I will still write regularly (I hope) but not necessarily daily.  Some days just aren't noteworthy.  Other days I have a dozen ideas in my head at the same time, and rather than try to parse them out into individual entries like I did in the last year, I will just slap them all on the page as they come to me.  Hopefully I can find a connecting theme from time to time, but I find I just write better when I have a jumbled mess on the page than when I sit down and try to determine how much I should put in one entry and how much I should ave for another one.  By the time I get to the next idea the creative thoughts behind how I wanted to phrase it are gone, I'd rather just rambled and see where the words take me if that is okay with everyone.  The last part of the title, the decimal point is just to signify which entry it is, so I managed to take that long overblown title I was throwing on my entries last year and knock it down to just a few characters for simplicities sake.

I suppose I should get about writing about the actual title today, since that was probably the hook that got you here in the first place.  Hopefully everyone had a good holiday season, as I said previously I worked on Christmas Day and New Years Day as well, so for me I just called them by what they were on the calendar, Thursday.  As of this typing I still haven't celebrated Christmas with my family yet, not sure when I will either.  Working 6 days a week doesn't leave lots of time for frivolity and festivities.  I made sure my large gift made it home at least, the new TV is hooked up and being used which is a good thing.  I think my family wanted to make sure they could watch the Steelers games on the big screen, of course now that football season is over for the Steelers, who knows what they will watch on it.  Knowing my mom it will be bad Hallmark channel movies and old episodes of Roseanne, but it's theirs, they can do with it what they want.  I still have a few gifts here for them, which I have no idea when I will see them to give them out so for the time being the rest of Christmas is on hiatus.  As is an sort of update on my Christmas list I left here on the blog.  If I haven't given them the rest of their gifts it only means that I haven't seen them to get anything they may have gotten me either, if anything at all.  With my mom being in her current state, I am not really expecting anything.  So my Christmas haul to this point consists of two cards, one $1 scratch off ticket and a $250 Christmas bonus from my boss.  Technically I did have money and lottery tickets on my list, so I guess we can scratch those off.

I did have one gift though that I had thought I had schemed perfectly to arrive at its destination before the holiday, but then the Post Office got in the way and now I am almost back to square one in sending it.  Allow me to explain.

Some of you may remember the gnome episode from earlier this year, where I absconded with one of the gnomes from one of our tellers at the bank (Gillian) with the intent of taking it for a weekend or so and snapping pictures of her gnome around Pittsburgh.  Of course that plan failed miserably as I broke the gnome the very first day I had it, and ended up trying to replace it, only to find that the new gnome was bigger than the old one by a lot.  I jokingly refer to him as Apache Chief gnome (Surperfriends shout out).  Anyway, Gilian has since left the bank, though not because of the gnome debacle, rather she was accepted into graduate school where she is studying to be a teacher and I couldn't be happier for her.  I like it when people make moves upward to pursue their dreams, even if it means I see them less often. 

Gillian and I still exchange messages on Facebook from time to time, and one day while checking out something she posted I had gotten an idea of something to get her as a Christmas present.  So I meandered my way over to Amazon and found what I thought would be a pretty cool gift, so I ordered it and got it gift wrapped and sent to the address I had for her.  Amazon assured me the gift would be delivered by Dec 23rd, which was pretty awesome, it would get there in time for Christmas.  Or so I thought.

I got an email from UPS saying the package was in transit, as well as a tracking number for it.  Something UPS will do on some of their orders is just get them to the nearest Post Office where they then let the USPS (United States Postal Service for those not in the know) finish the delivery.  So I check my UPS tracking number and it says the package has been delivered to the Post Office and they gave me a new tracking number for USPS.  So I am checking the new tracking number and it says that the package couldn't be delivered, which is when I realized that the address I had for Gillian was her old one and not her new one.  No problem I thought, if she left a forwarding address when she moved they will then just send it to her new address.  No harm, no foul. 

Imagine my surprise then the next time I checked the tracking info and found that her package was in Virginia, which last I checked, is nowhere near Pittsburgh.  So I send Gillain a message saying what happened, I get her new address and then set about contacting the Post Office.  I figure I got the tracking number and the new address, I will just use their contact link to correct the address the package needs to be sent to.  So after navigating a horribly designed drop down menu/contact section USPS has on their website I write a pretty lengthy note saying what happened and offering up the corrected address in hopes of facilitating  the delivery process.  The next time I check the tracking information once again the package is in Pittsburgh, but at the wrong Post Office.  Still hope springs eternal and I figure now that it is here they will make the necessary correction and all will be good.

But this is the Post Office we are speaking of, so I should have known better.  I finally got a reply to my message to them, saying that they could not change the address on the package, even though they knew it couldn't be delivered to the address that was currently on it.  In fact, they wouldn't do anything for me at all because my name wasn't on the package (because I sent it from Amazon), so they were going to take at least two weeks to "process" it before sending it back to Amazon (the senders address).  Now color me stupid, but if you have potentially two addresses to send a package and you are not going to send it to one of them, why the fuck does it take you two weeks minimum to send it to the other?  So now I get to sit here and wait while Amazon gets the package back, recredits my account so I can turn around and buy the same thing and send it out again, but to the corrected address.  At this rate I am hoping it gets there some time in July or something.

Okay, it is getting late, I still have some things to do here, like study for an upcoming Health Department exam on Thursday that I haven't even cracked a book for yet.  That's me, ever the procrastinator.  If not me then who, if not now then I will get to it later.