YES! The US Postal Service may cut back to a five-day delivery week! Just like Canada Post! Come over to the dark side! Hey you can save even more money by doing like our delivery route drones do and don’t bother delivering packages either. Don’t even attempt to bring them around to recipients’ addresses. Just dump them down at the post office without even leaving a delivery notice, and let it fall to the recipients to stop by the post office to ask if any packages are waiting. As has happened to us four times this month. Perhaps more — not sure how many Xmas presents were sent back or dead-lettered after unwittingly never being picked up. (At least two.)

On Wednesday I find a Canada Post package delivery slip in our mailbox, dated “01/05”. Obviously that’s the previous day, May 1, as per the standard Canadian day-then-month style of formatting dates, right? Right! Actually, no, not really. The post office tells me that this slip is my first and only notification for a package whose delivery was attempted on January 5. Which package has long since been returned to sender (if not thrown into the local Dead-Letter) after remaining unclaimed. Attention friends, family, and business associates: If any of you sent me something in late December or early January and either had it returned to you or never heard a thank-you from me, please try sending again if possible, this time via UPS or FedEx. Attention Canada Post: You continue to make me proud to be an American.

My border-crossing Amazon.com order of five weeks ago evidently gets lost in the mail and so they kindly send me a replacement order, expedited shipping, at no extra charge. (Actually they end up over-refunding me five dollars.) Among the books I’ve ordered is The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. From Paul Auster’s introduction:

Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for more than forty years … a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book. Joubert speaks in whispers, and one must draw very close to him to hear what he is saying.

The book opens with this notebook entry of Joubert’s, tentatively dated 1783:

The only way to have friends is to throw everything out the window, to keep your door unlocked, and never to know where you will be sleeping at night.

Several inches of snow over in Buffalo, I read. No snow here, aside from a few minutes this afternoon of big fat ugly wet snowflakes raining down like sodden confetti. I am imagining a vast warehouse-sized library or megabookstore whose floor-to-ceiling shelves display all their books face-out, the way movie-rental stores do, and wondering what it would look like. My Amazon.com books still have not arrived after two weeks … the bastards must have cottoned on to my frequent over-the-border ordering habits, and are now punishing me for it, making me wait three weeks instead of the usual eight days. Or is Canada Post to blame? Canada Post, pioneering the innovative four-day mail week. (They claim to operate Monday through Friday, but I can’t remember the last time we received mail on a Monday.) I phoned our apartment rep this morning to harass him over what he’s going to do about the maddening sound of dripping water inside our otherwise lovely apartment’s ceiling (condensation, we surmise); his voicemail greeting was still for Thursday and featured him saying I’ll be tied up in court all afternoon, but please leave your message…