I saw that our brave hero President (who you may recall said he’d happily run, unarmed, into danger to save a bunch of strangers’ kids) has opted to run away from the kids who will be marching on Washington (among other places) today in what my all-too-cynical side predicts will be an honorable yet ultimately futile attempt to shame our government into at least trying to do something to prevent school shootings (and, you know, maybe mass shootings in general). In a surprising turn of events, Trump opted to head to Florida to play golf instead.

That’s why these things never really seem to have an effect – most of us regular people can only do this shit on weekends because we have to, you know, go to work (or in this case school) during the week. And the feds get the hell out of town on the weekends, so other than maybe accidentally seeing a few fake news reports, they can basically ignore it all. Though I suppose a little public pressure probably lets them jack up their rates for the NRA lobbyists. But, hey, what do I know? I’m just a miserable old bastard these days (probably because I saw the Hippies grow up to be Amway salesmen, the Yippies turn into, well, Jerry “I can do more for the movement by making a fortune on Wall Street” Rubin, and the United States of America not only treating an ignorant, megalomaniacal conman as a legitimate candidate for the highest office in the nation, but actually swearing the fucking idiot into office).

Besides, I have more mundane things to deal with. Like, where the hell is my mail actually going these days. Pretty sure it’s supposed to be going to a PO Box, but I don’t see a lot to indicate that. Not that I care, because my mail is boring, unless it’s a package.

I’d kind of wondered about the whole package thing, now that Amazon ships so many things via USPS. As I mentioned in my previous whining, we got a PO Box to make life easier and not have to go looking through the ditch for our mail. So I thought, well, maybe First Class mail would get forwarded to the PO Box and the parcels would still come to the house. ‘Cuz, like, I have no idea ahead of time how Amazon is gonna ship something, and if it’s UPS or FedEx, I’d just as soon not have to go pick it up at the Post Office, so I don’t really want to change my shipping address.

Turns out, not only will the PO forward your mail, but also your packages. So far, so good. Except they seem to expect you to pay postage due on said packages, for the privilege of having them forwarded. And they want you to pay from the point of origin. Even if said forwarding literally amounts to the package going to the same PO it was going to anyway, but instead of loading it on a truck to be delivered to your house, they toss it in a bin for you to pick up yourself.

For instance, let’s say, hypothetically, you – as an Amazon Prime member – order a new gear set to rebuild your garage door opener, and it ships from Indiana. For “free.” Or actually for about $10 more than you’d have gotten it from somewhere else w/o free shipping. So far so good. Then you get a slip in your PO Box that says you have a package. Still good. And then you go to get it and they say, “postage due: $10.12!”

Not so good.

Well, if you’re like me, the first thing you do is cancel all your subscribe and save orders – I don’t mind getting some stuff sent to the PO, but if I have to go pick up cases of toilet paper and paper towels and whatnot, I’ll just go to Costco. I mean, the whole point was to make my life easier, not more difficult.

The next thing I did was have an online chat with Amazon, asking if I can find out how they plan on shipping an order before it ships so I can use the appropriate shipping address. UPS? To my street address. USPS, to the PO Box. Seems simple enough. Right?

Wrong.

The good news – according to customer service rep Rohan – is that a choice of carrier is something they’re “working on.” The bad news is they don’t have that feature yet. However, they do have a workaround, which is to wait until it ships, see how it’s coming, call or online chat with Amazon and change the shipping address while it’s en route. And since Rohan realized that’s not ideal, he offered me the choice of either an extra month of Prime or $10. Whether that’s because he saw I’d just cancelled a rather sizable amount of orders or not, I dunno. But I went with the ten bucks, and I’ll just make sure I don’t order anything bulky until I get this shit all figured out.

Speaking of garage door openers, that’s another one of my mundane worries for the weekend (as I wait for the snow to melt and the ground to thaw out enough to reconfigure my street mailbox situation – or at least find the existing mailbox door that’s still hopefully buried in the snow near the box and not halfway down the street somewhere).

I did manage to replace the gears and everything works swimmingly, as long as you don’t mind the door going down about 18″ before going back up again. I anticipated having to readjust the up and down travel and up and down force and all that, but no amount of adjustment seems to get the job done. So I consulted the trusty Internet, and it appears I either have something interfering with the “interrupter cup” or I’ve got it in the wrong position (which seems unlikely, give that it just kinda goes onto the end of the motor shaft), or, more likely, I’ve got too much play in the shaft (usually have the opposite problem these days) due to not getting the collar that holds it in place on tight enough.

So, it’s back at it. I can’t quite recall if this is something I can mess with w/o dropping it all back down again or not. That’s a hassle, but working above my head isn’t really something my shoulders do well these days. Or my neck. Or my back. And working up on a ladder alone is a real pain in the ass if you don’t happen to have at least three hands (and a net to catch all shit you drop).

Also, it’s still pretty goddamn cold around here (28° at the moment, and it’s not gonna get a helluva lot warmer), and now that I’m one of these old-timers that can never seem to get warm (until I start bitching about the heat), the thought of spending more time in my cold, dark, damp garage is pretty unappealing.

So maybe I’ll just Netflix and chill instead.

And, sadly, that’s not a euphemism.