I played spin the bottle once. It wasn’t the first time I french kissed a girl, but it was the second, third, and fourth time. Not too long after that, one of those girls’ tits was in my mouth, which I’m pretty sure was the first time. These days I don’t play spin the bottle, I play post office. But it doesn’t involve tits or french kissing or anything like of that nature.

No, playing post office means every couple of days or so I package up the sales of the web site, along with any wholesale orders and run them down to the post office to ship them out. If it’s been especially busy, I’ll ask Mrs.C to help me with the packaging and we set up a little assembly line on the kitchen table. We call this “playing cottage industry”, even though we live in a nondescript ranch-style house, not a cute little cottage with a thatched roof and hipped gables. We played at cottage industry today because all the discs people bought last Wednesday went out today. After taping them shut for nearly two months, we finally noticed that the mailers we bought were “heat sealing”, which meant I stuffed the envelopes, then Mrs. C ironned them closed. Very cottagy indeed.

The weather is quite fine, so if it were a normal day I’d put everything into the basket on my bike and ride down. Not today. Between the fundraiser and normal sales there were about 60 packages that had to go out – a volume we hadn’t seen in one day since the Xana and Dax discs arrived from the replicator and we filled all the outstanding pre-orders. So into the car they went for the short drive to the local post office.

The fellow at the counter gave me a good natured roll of the eyes. Each package has to be processed individually, each zip code has to be keyed in so the barcode on the postage strip is correct. But he gets paid by the hour, and knows that these packages are our living, so the eye roll was really just his way of saying, “Looks like things are going well. Good for you!” While he works his way through the small mountain of domestic shipments, I fill out the customs forms for the international parcels. I sign a credit card reciept – enough for half a week’s worth of groceries, and remind myself that the more money we spend on postage, the better we’re doing.

If this all seems rather mundane, well I suppose that’s the point. Many of the tasks that make this all work are rather mundane, but they’re mundane in a very nice way, like gardening or weaving. And like gardening or weaving, with patience and time the whole can begin to take a very nice shape indeed.

-TC

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