Closing the file

Wow, looks like it’s been kind of quiet around here. Lots going on, and where have I been? Oh, around, here and there, dealing with life and watching as our once-vaunted economy slides into a morass of depression that no amount of Prozac is going to fix. You’d think I’d be chomping at the bit to get my thoughts down.

You’d think that, and you’d be wrong. For whatever reason, I just haven’t felt like writing much in the last month or so. Maybe it’s post-holiday letdown, or maybe it’s just that I feel like it’s time to slow down and decompress. We had a hard-fought election campaign, and now that our new President is in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue I feel no small sense of relief. The world isn’t any kinder, and our economy isn’t any sounder, and maybe I’m just being naïve, but I’m confident in our new President. He’s a bright man, and I hope he succeeds. For the sake of all of us, he needs to.

Post office follies

There are many things I love about the city where I live, but my local post office isn’t one of them.  It’s no stretch to say that I’ve never had such indifferent terrible service from a post office as I have since moving here.  It wasn’t always like this; when I lived here in the 1990s, I never had a problem. Something must have happened in the interim.

My first inkling that something was amiss was in 2003, when I graduated from UCSB.  The university mailed my diploma, and it arrived on a rainy afternoon looking as if it had been dropped in a puddle and dragged through the mud, this despite the fact that my front porch is well-shielded from the elements on the 2nd floor.  When I went to the post office to complain, I got the most thorough stonewalling I’ve ever encountered from a government employee, and came to the conclusion that whatever happened, the local staff would simply cover for each other and nothing would happen to change that.

Ten years on

Today is the last day of the year, and there are, have been, and will be no shortage of posts in the blogosphere looking back at 2008.  This is logical, I suppose, but I find myself less inclined to look back at the year gone by than I am to look back at the last ten or twelve years—the last decade, as it were.

Decade, you say? Indeed…