I went down to the Chicago Cultural Center at noon for their "Jazz, Blues, and Beyond" free concert thing, hoping to hear Fred Anderson, who used to play at the Foundation's coffee house every Sunday night "back in the day". I haven't seen Fred in 20+ years, and was, frankly, surprised to hear that he's still around (he was easily in his upper 40's back in the 70's). Unfortunately, I guess Fred had surgery for something last week, as was unable to make the show, so there was some other jazz group playing. Since I had a lot of stuff to get done, I figured I'd just go grab something from the Art-O-Mat® down there and then head up to the Post Office. But, noooooo ... the Art-O-Mat was empty! I asked in the gift shop and they said that the new supplies were in, but they guy with the key to open it wouldn't be there until tomorrow. Bummer.
So, I wander over to Dearborn, and grab the #22 bus (the only thing that "worked" today was that bus showing up right away), which I took up to the Fort Dearborn Post Office, where I stood in a line of at least a couple dozen folks. When I finally get up to the desk, I find that the stamps (admittedly, odd amounts, 87¢, 60¢, and 48¢, but they were what I figured worked out as the fewest stamps on each piece going out in this mailing) that I needed they didn't have, nor did they have any good alternative suggestions.
So, I head across the street to get back on the bus, and end up waiting the better part of a half hour. While waiting, I call 411 on my cellphone and try to get a hold of the Main Post Office to see if they would have these stamps ... the phone rings, and rings, and rings, and rings, and eventually the 411 computer (which was connecting me) gives up and tells me to write down the number! Grrrrrrrrrrrr all the way around.
At this point I figure I'm not going to chance wasting another day by chasing down to the South Loop for stamps that might or might not be there, and run the order through the usps.com web site ... they had the stamps, the only problems being that a) I'm going to have to delay the mailing a few more days while they send those out, and b) I had to get more of each than I really needed. Oh well ... they'll be here by the weekend probably.
So, now, about an hour out from when I need to go pick up The Girls, I'm getting started on this big pile of "places to send my resume" print-outs on my desk. Times like this I really wish I was still drinking!
P.S.:
I did notice one cool thing on the USPS.com site ... those images (linked to the stamp denominations above) each show up in the little icon thing in the navigation bar in the browser! I wonder how they do that ... I'm guessing it's a program that feeds a miniaturized version of the stamp graphic to the thing which assigns those (as opposed to having those hard coded for each .jpg file), but that's very cool. It would be great for L.J. to grab that coding so that one's user pic showed up in the navigation area!
P.P.S.:
Scratch the above P.S. ... it seems that the "cool feature" is not on the Post Office web site, but a feature of the new version of FireFox! I was just posting some graphics in a comment elsewhere, and noticed that they were showing up both in the nav bar and in the tab icon ... very cool ... I do think this would be great if LiveJournal could figure out a way to have the user pic show up like that, though.