Looking at Bills and receiving packages

When you haven't been home for two and a half months, your mail becomes a little back logged......  An understatement to be sure.  But today Loyce and I started the arduous task of sorting thru and reading most of the piles and piles of mail.

Our younger son has stopped over and collected our mail out of the mail box pedestal on a regular basis and made a large pile in our kitchen.  And there it all was waiting for us.  I usually check the bills that I know about on the internet and keep them paid but there are those folks that only mail out billings.  So unless I knew that the bill was outstanding, they are weeks behind.

Of course during all of that, I had a watch that has a bad main spring in it, so it needs to go in for repair.  Its original invoice was here at the house, so that needed to be found and packaged.  After writing a short repair request note and boxing the package up, I took it to the Post Office.  Yes the US Postal Service.  Lately the packages that I have received from them have been in far better shape than packages received from UPS.

But with that said, we received our packages of clothing that we sent here from Arizona by UPS today.  The boxes were substantially unharmed as they went thru the system.  This worked quite well for us, so I will explain.

It was obvious that we couldn't pack all of our clothes and belongings into the CRV car for our return trip home, but we did want a bunch of it back here before we had a chance to return to Arizona in May. A bunch of years ago my parents had a park model in Mesa and would package fairly large shipping containers with clothes and other belongings.  They would send them thru the UPS system to the desert and then send them home as they were leaving.

This worked quite well, so we purchased some boxes at the Signal Butte Wal Mart and packed them up.  I shipped them on Monday making sure they were going ground.  I didn't want them to beat us home.  And they didn't as they arrived this afternoon just like they were promised.  And since it was all soft goods nothing inside was breakable.    Cost was about $55 plus the shipping containers and tape.  They weighed in at 45 pounds for both boxes together.

I would think that this is not the last time we will use this technique as we begin to outfit and supply a new home in the desert....

It was much warmer here again today as we reached the mid 60s, but the sun only briefly came out from under the cloud cover.  I am running around in a sweatshirt feeling cold.  Arizona has spoiled us for sure.

Retired Rod