Postal hypothesis...

Back when we owned the store, we became acutely aware of the fact that the USPS claim of Priority Mail being a 2-3 day service was, at best, optimistic. Priority Mail generally worked as advertised from Colorado to, say, Texas and California; not so if the destination was, say, New York.

Our bank has no branches in New York, so we've been depositing my freelance checks - which are actually written to our LLC - by mail. Not wishing to pay twenty-something smackeroos for courier service, I sent an envelope via Priority Mail to Oregon some time ago, which was delivered in two days. Similar letters sent since have all arrived in two days, up to now.

An envelope I sent Tuesday to the same place has, according to the post office, just left Alabama. I am pretty sure it will not be delivered today in Oregon.

What explains the difference? Of course, there are random factors, such as a mis-sort, that may be playing a role, and it's not as if I've sent hundreds of envelopes, which might give me a better overall picture. (Heck, I haven't even one good data point, yet.) But the envelope sent yesterday was different from the previous envelopes in that instead of buying the postage online (and having it be "part of" the label, in terms of bar-coding), I created and printed a label and then added postage using stamps.

I wonder if, because the bar-code reader can't find the postage in the bar code, whether the envelope gets spit out for manual processing to make sure the postage is right?

Cheers...

UPDATE: USPS says the item's been delivered. I'm pretty sure the wording of what I read at about 9 am said the item had actually left Montgomery; apparently, I either misread it, or the report of its departure was, um, premature.

Shipment Activity	Location	Date & Time
Delivered	PORTLAND OR 97208	03/29/08 4:33am
Arrival at Unit	PORTLAND OR 97208	03/29/08 4:32am
Processed	PORTLAND OR 97218	03/28/08 9:57pm
Processed	MONTGOMERY AL 36119	03/27/08 7:46pm
Processed	BETHPAGE NY 11714	03/25/08 10:13pm

Another find...

A notebook of A-LM's French: Level One, my mother's copy, but containing the booklets that were used in my first year's class. After three years of A-LM and a year of indifferent study in high school, I arrived in Mrs. V's class poorly prepared to face the rigors she imposed on her students, prompting her to go so far as to suggest that I had been "severely crippled" in my study of French as a result of the A-LM method.

In looking over the materials, I can see her point. The focus, as I recall, of each unit was the dialog on the first page, which was to be committed to memory, thus providing invaluable knowledge should one ever find oneself on a street in Paris in search of a library (Dis donc, ou est la bibliothèque?), or in a position to tell someone "it" - whatever it was, as long as it was of the feminine grammatical gender - is "straight ahead" (Elle est tout droit.).

There then followed a number of drills, adaptations, and directed activities. Explanations were sparse and terse.

Of course, memorization is an indispensable part of language learning once one has passed the age of about eight. Living in-country, memorization is sugared by the fact that you have to speak the language to survive, as it were, so it's not as if memorization is the purpose of the exercise.

When not living in-country, memorization tends to be a major drag, especially if what you're memorizing tends to not really relate to real life - and try as they might, the A-LM scenarios always smelled slightly of unreality.

As I've mentioned before, one of the most - for me - effective methods of teaching has been that made popular by Michel Thomas. In his method, you are led in small steps to say fairly complex sentences over a short period of time.

Curiously enough, I've run across something called "Synergy Spanish" that takes very much the same approach, claiming that you can speak enough of the language to get by if you master just 138 words.

So far, I've gotten through 10 lessons in my (copious) spare time, and enough seems to be "sticking" - which is the critical part - that I've been actually able to exchange a sentence or two with some of the (many) Spanish-speakers in the area.

---

More good news. The passbook that I thought I had put away was exactly where I saw it last... it was just that I was looking in another place when I went looking for it!

Cheers...