"Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow nor Dark of Night" will get us to serve you better.

For Christmas, the Stake Presidency sends out Christmas Cards. This year, they made square cards. I took a couple to the post office see what the postage would be, they told me there would be a 12 cent added charge for the square shape because the cards would not go through their machines. They had to hand sort them. (None of the cards were even being sent out of the zip code!) On top of that, they didn't sell a 12 cent stamp, I could get a regular stamp, and ten cent stamp, and a 2 cent stamp. I asked them about metering them, they said they could do the ones I had, I told them I had 200 to do. Their reply was that they couldn't meter that many. (I didn't want to get 600 stamps.)

I told the Stake President that I was thinking about deliviering the cards myself. Then I heard that it's "illegal to put something in the mailbox if it's not mailed." This is what really set me off.

I decided I didn't need a mailbox. I figured that if someone REALLY wanted to get something to me, they would figure out how to do it some other way than USPS. I was going to go home (this was at work), take my mailbox off the house, drive down to the post office, and return it. My plan was to tell them I didn't need the mailbox anymore, and they could keep the junk mail they keep sending me. (It should have helped them cut costs, right? What I don't see is why they needed to raise the price of stamps again...) I buy something at the store, affix it to my house, and suddenly it becomes property of a division of the US government? I build one myself, affix it to my house, and suddenly I can't say what goes into it? That would have also stopped the mailman from cutting across our lawn, he is cutting a path in it and doesn't seem to care.

Tara did not let me take the mailbox off the house. She also doesn't want me making something that looks just like a mailbox, but is labeled "Non-mail box" on the inside. She does want me telling the Post Office to stop sticking my mail in the non-mail box. I don't know, I still want to do it.