I’m at the point where, when I do something, I often figure I’m probably doing it for the last time in my life. I think I mentioned a while back that I bought a case of LED light bulbs because Home Depot had them for pretty cheap. I have CF bulbs in all my lighting fixtures at home (those that aren’t LED lamps, anyway), plus a pretty good supply of CF bulbs squirreled away in various places, so – assuming nobody breaks into the house and steals them – I’m pretty sure I’ll never have to buy another light bulb again.
I bought a case of 500 envelopes a couple months back too, and 100 “forever” stamps. The only thing I use stamps and envelopes for these days is mailing my property taxes in. Maybe the odd rebate form. At most, I mail maybe 5 things a year. So I’ve got 100 years worth of envelopes and 20 years worth of stamps. Maybe I’ll have to buy stamps again, but I doubt it (hopefully over the next 20 years they’ll come up with a way for me to print my own postage without have to subscribe to a service for $16 a month).
I guess if you do a lot of mailing, then something like stamps.com is worth it, but as cool as it seems, it just doesn’t make much sense to me (makes about as much sense as audible.com). My computer, my printer, my envelopes – and I have to pay close to $200 a year? Shit, the USPS only charged me $1.20 shipping for 100 stamps. At that rate, I could get over 1,300 stamps for $16.
And I’m definitely going to the grave with a surplus of envelopes. And checks. I got a couple hundred of those a year or two ago, so if I don’t move or change banks, they can bury me with those, too (though I did just join the credit union recently – if it weren’t for the pain in switching all my payments, I’d jump over completely).
I also may or may not be on my last set of dogs. Fritzi’s more or less at the half-way point in his life, and the other two kids probably have 10 years max. On the one hand, I really can’t imagine a life that doesn’t involve tripping over critters. On the other, well, I think three more deaths is really more than I can handle. Every time one of them dies (and of course they don’t have the decency to just wake up dead – you have to decide for them), it damn near kills me. Of course, that’s assuming I’ll outlive them – which, the way I feel these days isn’t exactly a sure thing.
One thing that definitely won’t outlive me is the skunk I found in the back yard a few days ago. At some point after I got up and let the dogs out, I detected the unmistakable aroma of Eau de Skunk wafting in through the open windows. Nothing major, mind you – and not terribly unusual, what with living out in the sticks and all. When it didn’t go away, though, and it finally got light enough out there to see a bit, I decided to go investigate. Two of the three dogs were inside and not too stinky (no stinkier than usual), but as I mad my way from the front to the back, I saw Peggy sitting by herself, looking rather proud.
Of course, when I got close I found that she was guarding the body of a poor dead skunk. So I got her and the other two inside (thankfully, while I could smell skunk it didn’t appear that she’d taken a direct hit), and headed back outside, snow shovel in hand. Aside from being dead, Pepé looked to be in pretty good shape (it was still darkish out, and I didn’t exactly perform a postmortem examination, but I didn’t see blood and guts) and relatively fresh. And pretty heavy as I rolled him onto my shovel (being careful to stay away from the business end – I wasn’t sure what might happen if I inadvertently pressed down on the wrong spot) and then flung him over the fence into the woods (in retrospect, I probably should have made an effort get him farther away).
Since then, we’ve been living under a cloud of stink. The dogs didn’t get a full blast, but 2/3 of them have a good stink going on.
Good thing winter’s coming.
