Offer

The past few days have been a bit of a whirlwind.  Long story made short, I put an offer on a house today.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I put an offer on a house.  This was not expected or planned at all prior to this past week, but it happened.  I'm simultaneously both super excited and super nervous about it.  I put an offer on a house!  That sounds ridiculous.

We had not been planning to start seriously looking for houses until the late fall or winter, but in the last week we found a really great house in our current area of town (the North Valley, which we love), and it was just too good of a deal to pass up.  A really, very fantastic house with tons of character.  It's a short sale situation, which means the process could take a number of months due to paperwork and dealings with the bank, so there will be a lot of waiting.  And of course there's no guarantee that the bank will accept our offer on the house, or even come back with a number that is doable.  But we're optimistic.

I don't want to jinx anything so I'll hold off on the details for now, but my fingers are crossed tightly.  Everybody should think positive thoughts of brick floors and adobe fireplaces for us!

First-ass Mail

You know what?  I support our president.  I voted for him before, and I'm going to vote for him again.  You can support whoever you want politically-- I may not agree with you, but that's your prerogative.

A couple of months ago, I purchased Josh and I some tshirts from the Obama store online.  I'm not exactly rolling in lots of extra dough, so I figured buying shirts was one way that I could support the campaign both financially and socially.  A few weeks go by, and we get our shirts.  They're nice shirts and exactly what we were expecting, except that mine is way too small.  No big deal, I'll send it back and exchange it for a more appropriate size.  So I package up the shirt and mail it back to The Obama Victory Fund, which is apparently the company that handles merchandise returns.  All is well.

A few days later, I receive a package in the mail.  It's the package that I had put in the mail days earlier, returned to me.  There are white stickers all over the front of it, a couple of red stamps of illegible text, and some handwritten scrawling, telling me that the postage was short by $0.59.  (For the record, I printed postage from the machine in the post office lobby that weighs your mail, so I am still confused as to why the weight and postage amounts were off.)  If this was somehow my fault for not correctly acquiring the right postage, that's fine.  But what's with all the stickers and scribbling?  Unfortunately I did not think to take a photo of it, although it was pretty messy.

I made the trip back to the post office and went to the counter to be sure that everything would be okay to re-send.  The little postman behind the counter took one look at the package and said, "Geez, does somebody downtown have a vendetta against you?  What's with all this?"  Apparently, this is not how returned packages are supposed to look according to USPS standards.  I laughed and (jokingly) suggested that perhaps it was due to the intended recipient of the package.  Mr. Postman looked at the address, shook his head, and (in all seriousness) agreed with me.  Then he noted that not only was the whole envelope covered in white stickers, but those stickers were in fact covering the barcodes necessary to mail the item.  Also, the C and the L in the words First-Class Mail were covered by another sticker.  Coincidence?  Mr. Postman said it was definitely no coincidence.  Mr.  Postman told me matter-of-factly that somebody in the downtown Albuquerque post office was an asshole.

Mr. Postman at the Eubank & Candelaria post office, on the other hand, was definitely not an asshole.  He spent a good five minutes painstakingly removing the offending stickers from my parcel so that no damage was done to the important barcodes.  He double-checked my postage to be sure that everything was weighed and metered correctly and re-labelled everything so there would be no mistaking.  He put extra tape across the seals so that nothing could come undone in transit.  And about a week and a half later, I received my new Obama tshirt.

All ended well, I suppose, but it sucks to think that some people are so blind-sighted by their political prejudice that they allow it to invade even their professional (and public service at that!) careers.  I guess I shouldn't be so surprised.  Clearly, Bukowski really did know a thing or two about postal workers.  But at least I know first-hand that not all of them are complete asshats.  If you have Obama-friendly outgoing mail in Albuquerque, I recommend taking it somewhere other than the downtown branch.