"You've Got Mail"

     Something amazing happened last Friday.  With anticipation I walked down to the end of my driveway, opened a little, black door...and found mail!!  This may not seem like something to be too overly excited or surprised about, I mean everyone gets mail delivered to them, right?  Doesn't our Declaration of Independence go something like this?..."We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...oh, and the right to receive mail at your place of residence." :-)  Well, it has been 90 long days since we have had any mail delivered to our mailbox.

     Warning to anyone who is looking for some grand revelation in my journey of discovery after our recent move.  :-) This post has absolutely nothing to do with any growth or emotional breakthrough on my part.  These are just some random, inconsequential musings...because quite frankly, all deep thinking must at some point be interrupted by randomness, however else would we all keep our sanity?

     When we moved into our newly built home on July 29th, our builders were planning to put up our mailbox for us. So I made a trip to our post office to find out if there were any guidelines the builders should follow in putting up the mailbox.  For instance, which side of the driveway it should be on, which side of the road it should be on, etc.  Little did I know I would continue to make this trip for a full 3 months! 

    I was told by our post master that we weren't "allowed" to put our mailbox up yet because in a new, rural neighborhood the government had to do surveys and studies into what would be the most cost effective and "efficient" way of getting mail to the new neighborhood.  This process included paperwork going back and forth between the developer of the neighborhood and the post master, (paperwork of which I might add, kept getting lost by the post office and had to be resubmitted by the developer) the route having to be driven by someone conducting the "study/survey", and the amount and type of mail coming into the post office for new residents of the neighborhood having to be analyzed and counted to come out with an average rate and type of mail received by aforementioned new residents. (huh? :-)) We were told that the reason the mailbox couldn't be put up yet was that the government needed to await the results of the survey to determine whether we'd need to share a post with our neighbor, have our own post or simply just have to keep making the drive to the post office daily.

     So I continued to make the 4 mile drive to the post office, which was in the opposite direction of anywhere else I ever went, while I waited for the government to do it's work...I need to mention here that within the first week of moving in we had deliveries made straight to our door by both privately owned FedEx and UPS (shout out to our friends who work for each of these companies :-)). Last week we finally got the call from the United States Post Office that we had the go ahead to put up our mailbox.  What were the specific instructions as to how and where we should put it up as per the extensive studying and surveying that had been going on for the past 3 months you ask? "Eh, put it where ever you want, just be sure your name and house number are on the box so the mail carrier will know who's mail should be delivered there." (side bar: there are currently 3 total, count them, 1, 2, 3, houses in our neighborhood :-))

   I'm left to ponder just how much exactly all this surveying and studying cost...and question whether this is really the picture of efficiency?  Final thought of the day on my random musings...in the bigger picture, of things more consequential than whether or not I have to make the drive to the post office everyday, will we as a country ultimately benefit as a whole from more or less government in our day to day lives?  Just sayin'. ;-)

Don't take the little things for granted :-)