Yesterday I went to mail my wedding invitations. After being pulled over for speeding to the New Lenox Post Office only to find out that it had already closed for the day, I drove over to Mokena where I was summarily told that I didn't have enough postage on my square self-mailers (.88, needed 1.05). I was borderline despondent (it was a lousy day already anyway. I had already checked the postage with my local post office in Chicago and asked if any additional postage was required because of the shape of the envelope, I'd been told "no." I HATE it when people don't do their jobs, or feed you a line of bullsh*t because they're too lazy to find out the correct answer. What if I hadn't double checked in Mokena? Would all of my 130 invitations been returned to me for insufficient postage? Would they have arrived to my guests "postage due"? Argh. Crisis averted, I guess? As I was buying $55 of additional postage (so I could have the pretty .44 ring stamps that matched the others on my invitations), I asked the woman behind the counter if she would hand cancel them for me when I returned today. She said "no," that hand cancelling wasn't done anywhere anymore because everything must be machine fed. I said, "so, when the woman at my Chicago Post Office told me that she would hand cancel them for me, she was lying to get me away from her window? No one does this in Chicagoland anymore??" Her response was to shrug and say, "wellll...." as if she wanted to tell me that the Chicago Post Office lady had indeed been full of sh*t but that as a government employee she didn't feel comfortable saying so. End question: do we know for a fact that any post office in Chicago or the surrounding burbs will hand cancel invitations? How do we know? Has anyone actually seen them do it? I'm more than a little incredulous at this point. I'm beginning to think that postal workers will do anything they can to get you gone, including making promises they have no intention of keeping. Hrmph.

Wedding Date: January 16th, 2010

Cycle #5: BFP on June 14, 2011 -- Due Date: February 23, 2012 -- Born: February 26, 2012