We deliver for you

Day +7, platelets crashed, and had a bag of platelets transfused. Just in time, too, since I had just crashed my knee into the coffee table. Almost immediately the knee swelled alarmingly, so we had a reminder of why platelets are a good idea.

How I came to crash into the coffee table might be a better story--I was distributing the mail, which contained an amazing item.

Rosie moved to Boston this summer, bringing with her a car that had outlived its usefulness. After casting around a bit, we determined that we were going to donate it to the International Myeloma Foundation. This turned out to be difficult, because she didn't have the car's title (I did). So I tried to send it to her, but apparently messed it up in some way that may it non-transferable.

When we were home for a few days at the beginning of August, I went to get a replacement, but the new title had to be mailed from Frankfort. We'd had no problems (other than that it costs $15/week) with the USPS' "Premium Forwarding Service" on our first foray to Rochester, so I set it up for our trip to Colorado. The idea is that once a week the post office bundles up all your mail and sends it to you in a single package. When we got to Colorado, we went to the post office every day or two, but nothing ever showed up. We talked to the clerk, who took my phone number and was trying to be helpful, but apparently "Premium" does not include a ready way to track packages. We returned to Louisville with no mail.

So I visited our Louisville post office, took phone numbers, gave them mine, all to no avail. Apparently this was all the responsibility of someone named "Norm" (really!), who was on vacation until Monday or maybe the next Monday. Sadly, we had to get back to Rochester, to yet another address, before Norm was due back. The PO people advised me to skip the Premium Forwarding Service and go with regular old forwarding. Meanwhile, our mail has been AWOL for almost a month.

Back in Rochester, we began with phone calls. First to Colorado, where the same clerk was still helpful but still hadn't seen the mail. Then to Louisville, where Norm remained on vacation, apparently. No joy at all. An hour later my phone rang and the clerk from Colorado(!) had apparently called the Louisville post office and shook them down for a tracking number, which she gave me, along with the news that the "To" address that the USPS had in their system was not our current address, nor the Colorado address, nor our home address, but the first Rochester address we were using in July. So the package was at the Rochester PO, marked "Undeliverable as addressed."

I headed over to the Rochester PO, and spent an hour waiting for someone to search the apparently unordered heaps of undeliverable mail, only to report that she could not find anything matching this tracking number. She thought it might have been out for delivery, in the possession of the carrier. Two days later, we tried again, and during the course of a lengthy conversation, I found that I could at least set up alerts so that any time the package status changed, I would get an email. After we returned empty-handed from the PO, I got a new message: 3 hours earlier, the package had been returned to Louisville.

I waited two days and called Louisville, asked for Norm. I didn't get him, but the woman I talked to left a message. An hour later, Norm called. I hadn't actually believed that he was real. But he was, and claimed to have our package right in front of him. He promised to send all our outstanding mail in a single package to our current address. Two days later, that package arrived. It contained shipments made during the entire time we were in Colorado, not a single piece of which was necessary or important. And no title.

So today, about a week later, what should show up in the small trickle of yellow-labeled forwarded mail (mostly these are bills from Mayo) but a nice clean new-looking envelope from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, containing a title issued August 8. What happened in the interim is anyone's guess. By happy coincidence, Rosie is here visiting us right now, so I was happily (perhaps too happily) delivering the title to Rosie when I hit the coffee table.