The Post Office and I Are Becoming BFFs

December 14, 2012

post office silly faceRound 1.

I am a bit amazed at how long it takes just to wrap up this adventure. I guarantee you it will take this entire month (at least) to organize and wrap out this crazy year.

One of the things that means, is that I get to have a very loving relationship with the post office.

The post office and I already have a pretty beautiful, loving relationship. I’m a sucker for letters and cards. I’m not perfect about sending them out, but I think I send out a lot more than most people my age. Emails and things can’t ever compare to handwritten stuff. (Yay mail!)

Over the year, I’ve accumulated various things at expos and races that I’m just not going to use. Some of the things are cute and wonderful (such as a rad pink headband from the Rock ‘n’ Roll series). But how many water bottles can I realistically use? How many knick knacks do I need?

I may weirdly have a lot more space in California. (Apartments are huge out here!) But I still want to live as though I’m in New York (which is probably a smart way to live no matter where you are).

I think I’m basically going with these three categories:
A) Things I use often, such as favorite shirts I wear.
B) Things worthy of display. (Race medals would fall in this category.)
C) Things that need to be saved for a reason. (For instance, paystubs, taxes stuff, etc. If you’re super organized and have a scanner, you could have no physical trace of a lot of these things. I am not that person.)

If I have things that don’t fit into these categories (and right now I do!), I have to ask myself the questions – Do I need this for any reason whatsoever? Realistically, am I ever going to use this? If the answers are no and no, it’s time to get rid of them!

If you follow me on twitter, you saw that I sent 2 boxes of old race shirts and protein/energy bars to Newark. (Not every good deed needs mentioning, but my super favorite superhero/role model/mayor tweeted me thanks – therefore making me have to shout it from the rooftops, ’cause he’s Cory Booker.

Cory Booker thank you tweetOn this trip to the post office, I sent off various things (such as the pink headband mentioned earlier) to some friends who said they’d take this extra stuff off my hands. I’ve also started the process of finally sending out those care packages from the 13.10 challenge.

Operations “Purge Apartment” and “Care Package Fun” are well underway.

I learned something amazing at the post office. Did you know there is a think called “book rate”? If you are sending someone a book, you get a special, cheaper rate (about 1/3 of the cost in this case!) than packages with non-book items. (There are also special prices for DVDs and CDs.)

There’s this really fun lady at our post office who calls everyone – (everyone as far as I can tell) no matter what their age – “young woman” or “young man,” which I thought was kind of cute, and made me chuckle.

Also, I bought some rad Hanukkah stamps. Am I Jewish? No. But were the stamps cute and fun? Yes. Perhaps I’ll wait and randomly use them on stuff in the summer. That might be fun, right?

For now, it’s time to package up stuff for round 2!

I'd love to hear from you! So whaddya say?