Of Cabbages and Kings

Well, I knew the whole True Blood/Twilight thing had millions of fans by the jugular, and that lately these days even Jane Austen heroines were taking a page from the Zombie Defense Guide...

But I had no idea that this trend toward horror revisionism had seized my friend, author Lewis Carroll, in its pale and bony grip. UNTIL I bought a set of festive Alice-in-Wonderland-themed drinking glasses.

Through The Drinking Glass and What Jenn Found There...

Each glass features drawings of little Alice and her Wonderland colleagues, along with swirling literary quotes. Cute, right?

But it was only upon closer inspection I realized that the Tea Party Patriots might not be the only tea-drinkers calling for blood these days...

Here you can see Alice fleeing the Mad Tea Party realizing that the Earl Grey she'd been enjoying was actually a Vlad the Impaler Pekoe...

A little spicy, filled with nutrients, and just a hint of lemon!

The Hatter, too, seems to be imbibing of the human life fluids...

Not exactly what you expect to see in dinnerware unless you worked for American McGee.

Now you might say, "Jenn, you giant doofus! What you're looking at is a cheap four-color printing process and the manufacturers just didn't want the added cost of making the tea brown."

Ah, but think how this puts a whole new spin on the Red Queen! And the Queen of Hearts-- how literally do we want to go with that? I mean, no wonder she was so big on mass decapitation-- I hear the same went for ol' Vladdy-boy back in the Transylvania homeland.

She wasn't cranky, she was just following a fine old Eastern European tradition.

This also explains why Wonderland is located underground. None of that pesky sunshine interrupting a hot croquet game with the players exploding into ash every few minutes.

Of course, there will have to be a sequel.

Though Through the Looking Glass might be tricky for a lead character who can't actually see her reflection.

Marketers'll have to revisit that one.

It's been a challenging week. And by challenging, I mean more involved planning, elaborate precision, multi-tiered problem solving, and gut-wrenching roadblocks than a caper film involving Mini cars and big explosions.

Only without, y'know, the fun.

(Or Mark Wahlberg and his one facial expression.)

But hey-- I successfully moved my Dad from the Florida Keys to here in Pittsburgh, without actually flipping out on my relatives who tell me to "let them know if there's anything they can do to help Dad, only they're not sure what they can do because they're so very far away, and are really busy, and have a new washer and drier delivered tomorrow, and need to be there for that, so good luck with everything okay thanks bub-bye."

But I didn't blog to tell you about my Mr. Hyde inner rage.

I'm blogging today to tell you about the amusing bit of bureaucracy I ran into at a Florida Keys post office on Friday.

The goal had been simply to get Dad's mail routed to my address while he's here in Pittsburgh for cancer treatment. So I filled out the form and Dad signed it and we approached the bright and shiny front desk.

There, the postal worker-- a lady who looked sun-blighted from years in the Keys, or her color possibly drained from Post Office Customer Service and dealing with people like me-- examined the form and said to Dad:

"So you're leaving the Keys forever, huh? Well, good luck!"

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

She indicated Dad. "He's not coming back, right?"

I wondered if she knew more about Dad's medical diagnosis right now than we did. Maybe she was like that cat I read about in the news who could just tell who the next person in the hospital would be to snuff it.

"Um, we don't know yet," I said, puzzled. "He might, but we don't know when. That's why we didn't choose the option where you have to fill in a date to start routing his mail back here."

"You checked Permanent. He's moving away permanently. So he can't come back," she told me.

Now, by this point in the day, I had already:

Walked about a mile to get Dad's car from the hospital parking lot and drive it back to his house
Run numerous errands
Personally dropped off the man's water bill and electric bill payments because he insisted that no one should spend the stamps to mail them when it was so easy for me to just run in.

I had flown through a tropical storm to get there, was working on not enough sleep on Dad's dusty sofa, and my stomach was roaring like a grizzly bear on picnic grounds...

I was a woman on the edge.

"Can't come BACK?!" I asked.

Dad saw the inner Hyde emerging and assured me, "She's kidding."

I said, "I don't have a sense of humor right now. It's moved. And it's checked the Permanent box."

But the Post Office Worker was not smiling. "I'm serious. He can't come back. Once that box is checked, we can never route his mail back there again. We need a date when he'll return."

"But I don't know the date when he'll return," I said. "People move all the time and never have an idea when they'll be where. How can I know what that date is? I am not Nostradamus!"

But she just said how this was a much better system than it was before, and the fact we hadn't needed to write a date in the previous system was WRONG, and this now is RIGHT and the most efficient way of doing things and...

"Is Eric Idle back there?" I asked the heavens. "Is Michael Palin or John Cleese going to pop out and say, 'And now for something completely different...'? Please tell me they are."

But she didn't seem to know those guys. Perhaps they worked there before she joined the USPS.

Eventually, we agreed to choose a completely arbitrary date in the future, which she says I will only now have to remember to change and update before it comes due-- making this system, thus, so very easy and user-friendly and far superior to the previous system and...

Dad was tugging me to the door.

I've heard that phrase, "You can't go home again."

Guess our friends in the Postal Service take that to the letter.