The postman delivers mail to the Red Army

This fine postcard was another very pleasant surprise from Postcrossing, in the form of RU-1125795. According to the sender, it shows a photo entitled "The postman hands a letter to the Red Army," from a set of "victory mail" released by the Russian Post "for the day of victory in the great patriotic war." You know I love any imagery of mail and mail delivery, especially involving mail carriers, and views of postpeople from other countries and eras always fascinate me. Plus, he's got a great bike!



The sender, Yury, even included this awesome stamp showing Vologda lace.

Another no-mail Monday coming

Due to New Year's Day falling on a Sunday, the U.S. Postal Service will observe the holiday on January 2, 2012. So mail your stuff today, folks, because we won't have pickup or delivery again until Tuesday.

On the bright side, that means Tuesday will likely be a good mail day!

Is the U.S. Postal Service is really in trouble?

Image: cover of the Sept 19, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, with a parody of the unofficial postal service motto. We subscribe to the magazine, and the covers are always witty, but this one is a favorite, and relevant to this post, so I hope I'm not blowing the cover surprise for any subscribers who haven't received it yet.

A lot of folks have been talking about what trouble the U.S. Postal Service is in these days. Dropping Saturday delivery? Going bankrupt? Defaulting? It's a complex story - and our postal service is a complex institution, being an odd mix of a mandated public service/agency that is expected to generate its own private revenue - and I am the first to admit I don't understand the details of it. So I've tried to refrain from posting some of the "doom and gloom" news stories, which I'm sure most of you have read or seen, until I can really get a handle on my own opinion on it.

Of course I support the U.S. Postal Service, I believe in its value and necessity, and I want to see it thrive - but that doesn't mean I have blind faith with how it is run. Still, I wouldn't want to run it myself, so...

I've found a few links that I think are really valuable and I'd like to share, for those who really want to know more.

The best compilation of facts I've yet found is at savethepostoffice.com. The Consolidating processing network map post has some insightful analysis of the numbers, and some musing on what these closures would mean for mail delivery time. I'm still exploring other areas of the site, including an excellent indexed news table with links to stories of post office closings.

I'd also like to highlight Save America's Postal Service because it is from the perspective of postal workers - letter carriers, mail handlers, postal workers union, and the people who really know what's going on from the inside out. I gather that the very nature of the budgetary issue right now has become tangled up in politics (sigh, what hasn't these days?), but I found their background explanation of the situation to be most illuminating. (In their words, "a congressional mandate is killing the U.S. Postal Service.") Whatever your thoughts on the matter, it's worth reading for perspective.

A great source of insider postal service information is Your Postal Blog, pithily written in the voice of "Benny the Blogger," aka our first postmaster, Benjamin Franklin. I've had this blog linked from mine for years and am a regular reader, as it's not only well written, but full of good, current, accurate information from those in the know - and not those in the business of sensationalized conjecture.

So what can WE do? Well, write letters, buy stamps (vintage stamps are fun, and I buy them, too, but I always make sure to buy new issues just to support the postal service), and send mail, of course, but beyond that, I really don't know.

I do think the McCaskill Mail idea pitched by Melissa of Viva Snail Mail is a lovely one, though, and certainly can't hurt anything.

A very odd Monday

Monday is usually my biggest mail day.

Every now and again, a day will come when I get no mail - often a Tuesday, maybe a Saturday - but NEVER a Monday...

...until today! Today was my first mail-free Monday in years. Something funky must be up with the sorting, as the friendly folks at my UPS store who answered my frantic queries ("WHAT? Did the mail not get sorted? Where are all my letters and postcards??") said that it startled them, too, because the only mail that came into the whole store today, with hundreds of mailboxes (my UPS store box is similar to a P.O. Box, except that I can get any kind of delivery including UPS and FedEx, and they're significantly more service-oriented), was packages and magazines.

Go figure.

All of Rhode Island mail is sorted in Providence, so I wonder if my fellow Rhode Islanders had the same issue today, or if it's specific to my area.

It's got me a little bummed out, but it's not like I don't have a HUUUUGE backlog of fun mail to keep me busy anyway. And hey, tomorrow will be a BIG mail Tuesday.

(Or else I really will be biting my fingernails!)

Canada Post is back!

A big sigh of relief for all the Canadian snail mailers - Canada Post is fully operational as of today. Hooray!

Dogsled mail

As further proof that I need to continue the blog posts about great stamps, a Canadian blog reader sent me a fine letter with these great Canadian meta-mail stamps showing historical mail delivery methods in the hinterlands of our neighbor to the north. I think they are a new release? He explained them quite nicely, so I shall quote him directly:

The first stamp tells the story of the winter of 1910 in the Magdalen Islands. A telegraph cable snapped and left the inhabitants cut off, so they put their mail in that barrel, rigged a sail to it, and sent it off with a letter asking the finder to mail it. The second stamp shows a dog sled carrying mail, which until airmail was the only reliable method in northern Canada. It was still used regularly until the 1960s, and it's still possible to have mail delivered this way by the Gold Rush Trail Dogsled Mail Run in January!

Wow. So incredibly cool. And I am so very delighted to have received these stamps firsthand!

So... anybody ever had mail delivered via the Gold Rush Trail Dogsled Mail Run?

Slowest snail mail award

I wrote a letter to a friend in Bermuda on October 6.

It arrived today.

Wow.

On blizzards and mail delivery

My husband and I were among the lucky few travelers who were able to reach our destination (home!) on Sunday, December 26. Our flight from the midwest landed in Baltimore late morning, just before the snow started, but when panic had already set in. Our flight to Providence from Baltimore was the last Providence-bound flight that left that day. (All subsequent Providence-bound flights were canceled, which made our flight a standby zoo. We were so glad to have our seats on that early flight!) We later learned that our flight was one of the last to leave Baltimore (at noon!) and possibly the very last one to touch down in Providence around 1pm.

So we drove home to Newport in a lovely blizzard (all was safe), only to learn that the main bridge onto our island (yes, Newport is on an island) closed later that night due to high winds. The Pell Bridge doesn't close very often! But hey, the NJ turnpike doesn't close very often, either, and it closed that night.

It was still snowing Monday morning, but lightly. This is New England. We are used to snow. So what if there's a foot of it? Roads were plowed, life seemed fairly normal. But when I went to pick up my mail at our local UPS store, I got only one package. What? On a Monday? After Christmas? One package and NO personal mail? Apparently local trucks were delivering, so that package must have made it to the Newport sorting station before Dec. 25. The pros at my UPS store told me that local mail trucks were on the road, but the trucks from Providence didn't make it down to us. (Rhode Island is the tiniest state, as many of you know... mail for the entire state is sorted in our capital city of Providence.)

But here's the kicker: UPS trucks weren't even on the roads that day! I have that from an official UPS employee. Goodness! Our own underdog postal service is more intrepid than UPS! Who knew?

Though the apocryphal post office creed, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," clearly doesn't hold when getting mail from Providence to Newport, they at least moved the mail around on the island. Yay U.S. Postal Service!

Anyone else have any fun blizzard-related mail delivery stories?