Well, crap. Summer’s officially unofficially over now. The kids are headed back to school today (or tomorrow), it’s cold out, and I guess I need to start thinking about closing up the pool. It could be worse, I guess. At least I took today off. If I had to go to work today, I’d be really depressed.

It’s not all bad news, though, as the Auburn Doubledays not only made the NY-Penn League (that’s baseball, BTW) playoffs, but clinched home field advantage for the first round (or series, or whatever they call it in baseball) as they open against the Vermont Lake Monsters (named, no doubt, for ‘Champ’ – cousin of Nessie – who lives in the depths of Lake Champlain). When Major League Baseball has a team named “Lake Monsters,” maybe I’ll pay attention to them. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why is a team from Vermont in the NY-Penn League? No clue. However, if I have my way, they’ll be redrawing the borders so that where I live will be part of Vermont and Bernie Sanders can be my Senator. Actually, my first choice was Canada, but I don’t think they want us.

It looks as though President Obama has achieved his goal of uniting the nation. New polls show that pretty much everybody thinks he sucks. Of course, everybody thinks all the Republicans suck, too. Kind of a shame that Obama is, well, whatever it is that he is, because somebody – damn near anybody – else would have taken advantage of his initial popularity and mandate for change and run with it (especially in that short little window when the Democrats had at least theoretical control of both Houses of Congress and the Republicans were still stunned and trying to figure out how to call Obama a n*gger w/o calling him a n*gger; fortunately, the teabaggers came through for them in their hour of need).

I’m still trying to figure out how somebody can get swept into office the way he did and, to all appearances, spend every day in office trying to undermine his own effectiveness. I just can’t figure that guy out.

I’d pine for a Hilary Clinton administration, but the fact that she appears to have the support of Dick Cheney kind of gives me the willies. Even if Obama did the honorable, LBJ-kinda thing and decided not to seek a second term, I don’t know who’d be out there to fill the void. I mean, that could actually get elected.

Sounds like the USPS is in kinda deep shit. I hate to see anybody get laid off, but if they want to cancel Saturday delivery, that’d be OK with me. In fact, if they wanted to scale residential delivery to, say, three days a week, that would work.

They should also quit shipping physical pieces of mail across the country. Instead of a mailbox, you could have an ATM kinda thing. So if you want to send a letter, you put it in the slot, enter the recipient, select tracking and delivery options, it charges your debit card, and it scans your letter, encrypts it, sends it in electronic format to the PO distribution center nearest the recipient, where hi-speed printers print it out and put it in an envelope for the carrier to deliver (your mail person would just go to work in the morning, press a button, and in a couple minutes all that day’s deliveries would be spit out, all sorted and bundled and ready to go). Then your letter would be stamped as sent and returned to you as a receipt.

This would not only save shipping and sort time, but it would save the FBI and NSA and whatnot all the hassle of opening your mail and reading it. It could just go directly into a databank to be analyzed.

For paper bills that you can’t pay online – like the damn school taxes – these mail Kiosk things would have a check slot for scanning your check (or, alternatively, you have it charge your debit card and it spits out a check or postal money order or whatever at the other end).

Of course, all this would also be available both at home via your Internet connection, or from inside the Post Office for those who require assistance. The PO could even offer encrypted flash drives where you could not store your mail and receipts and stuff, but you could also add money to your postal account on them. And if you lose it, you just get a replacement (since it’s encrypted, it’s only accessible to you and the NSA), and ‘deactivate’ the old one – which is automatically erased if anybody tries to read it.

You could also design birthday cards and stuff like that, scan a note and your signature, select the card stock, pay to have a ‘rush’ delivery (‘cuz you forgot tomorrow was mom’s birthday), and off it goes.

Oh, and of course there would have to be iPhone and Droid apps for it.

If they’d put me in charge, I could fix pretty much everything. But as long as old men who don’t know the difference between a fax and an e-mail are running the show, we’ll be lucky they aren’t delivering the mail by stage coach.

I don’t know how things were where you were yesterday, but here, it rained. Pretty much all day long. Not monster rain – pretty light, but steady. Kind of a shame it had to do that here (and down south), when they need so much of it in the Southwest.

The rain is supposed to stay (barely) to the east of us today, but move back in tonight. So I reckon I’d better get the grass cut. Oh, and do three day’s worth of laundry.

Tomorrow’s gonna be really, really depressing.