Riding High

The USPO has this tiresome policy of requiring you to pick up your mail every twenty minutes, or something, and if you are going away for more than a few days, you have to fill out a form telling them how long you are going to be gone and when you are coming back and whether you want them to hold on to all your mail until you appear before them or want them simply to hold on to it until the day you come back and then they’ll put it all in your mail box. That latter option requires you, of course, to absolutely know when you are coming back and to be there within two days of it. Or else your mail will have been sitting around in your mailbox getting stale or cold or just too old to be of interest. And do they throw it away? Or what? I fill out the forms, so I have not found out the consequences of not doing so.

I suppose there are reasons for this that make some sense in some other places where the USPO operates. Perhaps people steal the mail out of street mailboxes. It seems unlikely that anybody is stealing the mail out of your post office box, though, and they make you fill out a form for that for every absence, as well. You can fill out the form for the street mailbox on the net, but you can’t fill out the form for the post office box. I doubt if there actually is any reason for that.

But the upshot of all this, is that we often don’t get a copy of the All Point Bulletin, because it is somehow put into the street mail boxes, but not if you have a hold on your mail at the time it comes out. And we usually do. In such a situation, you can generally pick up a copy of the newspaper at the post office itself or at the International Market, but this month, on the 2nd of June, there were copies of the paper neither place. And so I was obliged to wait for almost a week to discover a newspaper and find out whazzup. (In truth, I read some, but not all, of it on the web.)

We’re on a roll, it turns out. The County has decided to leave the remnants of the APA Cannery, including its pilings, down at Lily Point. And the never-ending saga of the Fire Department has taken another turn wherein the new Fire Chief, appointed only one month ago, wrote a very critical assessment of the P.R. Volunteer Fire Dept., and the Fire Commissioners sacked him (not clear whether it was temporary or permanent, but Episode 2,437 will be playing next month, stay tuned). The County Library wants more tax because the County Library has had its budget cut (yes!yes!yes! to public libraries!). And the Taxpayers Association and the Voters Association are going to try a merger. They used to be just one organization (the P.R. Community Association) back in the 1970’s. So we’re back to square one there, I think. The County isn’t going to operate the dock at Lighthouse Park, so I don’t know how anybody is going to get their boat in the water (and the boatowners are not happy). And the Chamber of Commerce wants help with the July 4th Parade, but unless they promise fireworks (I’m sure they’re an environmental hazard, but I have a sentimental fondness for them if handled safely), I’ll probably just watch the parade.

And, with all these matters in play over the summer, perhaps we can slowly forget about the trash situation.