Getting jaded towards the post office.

last modified: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 (9:51:32 PM CST)

Augh!!!

I apologize for how long the rant is. I don’t even get to the point of why I’m a nervous wreck until 4 or 5 paragraphs down. ^__^;;;

So, the post office is seriously going downhill. Don’t get me wrong, I love mail. One of the first things I ever collected were stamps (still have them.) I’m one of those people who always send out about 40 postcards whenever I go on a trip, even if it’s not a terribly interesting trip. The post office’s hours have been getting downsized to the point where it’s almost impossible for anyone who has a regular job to ever go to the post office. My post office branch used to open at 8:30. I have to be at work at 9, and I have a 40 minute commute…so even when they had acceptable hours it still made me late for work. Then they slashed their hours and don’t open until 9…so if I need to pick up a package before work it makes me almost a whole hour late. I’m lucky that I work at a pretty lenient office, and can get away with that…not everyone even has the option to accommodate the new post office hours (if they need to work less hours fine…but can’t they shift the hours over so it doesn’t line up with everyone else’s hours??) If I wait more than 2 days to pick something up (so I can hold out and go on the weekend, the only time they’re open that works for me) they start leaving urgent warnings in my mail box that they’ll send my package back. The last time I waited 3 days to get something they misplaced the package. So…argh. I’ve just resigned myself to be late for work whenever I need to get something. I see the whole mail system slowly dying and in attempt to help it hang in there I go out of my way to send as much mail as possible. I pay all my bills with checks even though it would be cheaper and easier for me to pay them online. That’s bad for my environmental conscience, but I feel like I need to do what I can to keep a dying system from going obsolete.

Anyway…last time I picked something up I was informed by the person helping me that while the regular office doesn’t open until 9, the package pick-up window can help me at 8:30. I was thrilled because picking up packages is the only time I have an urgency to get to the post office and can’t wait until the weekend. Fantastic. I showed up at 8:40 this morning, very pleased to be able to get my package without worrying that I’d lose more than half an hour of my paycheck.

I get there…the person working is NOT happy to see me. She complains that I’m early and she hasn’t unloaded the mail. I was going to apologize when she came back and explain that I’d been told I could come at that time…the apology got a bit distracted watching her dig for my package.

Yeah…I do mean dig. My box (which you can tell obviously had a cel in it since I’m bothering to put this rant here instead of elsewhere,) was buried beneath about 5 CRATES full of other mail. One side of the box was completely smashed in. I seriously almost had a heart attack. It just so happens to be the most expensive cel I’ve bought so far…and I’d already been stressed out for several days about the money I’ve spent recently (the original topic of this post was meant to be a resolution not to buy anything else for a couple of months…we’ll see how that goes.) Luckily the cel was insured (even more luckily it survived and I didn’t need to utilize that) and very well packaged. But there is only so much good packing can do against a few hundred pounds of crates on top of it. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to put a priority mail box at the bottom of a bin of crates??? Just….yaarrrgh.

So, anyway. The cel is by some miracle okay despite arriving in a horrifyingly battered box. I used to only get really expensive items insured, esp when I trusted the seller (I’ve bought something from this person before and knew they did an excellent job with packing so I almost assumed insurance wasn’t necessary, yikes,) but I think I’ll be insuring everything now.

WTF? Where’d THAT come from???

last modified: Monday, March 29, 2010 (1:37:59 PM CST)

Okay…so has anyone else ever opened up their cel books (or whatever else you use to store them,) and found themselves utterly BAFFLED at the discovery of something you have *no recollection whatsoever* of acquiring??

I have a horrible memory. Seriously, really truly terrible. I’ve been called flakey to my face before, and I honestly can’t blame people for thinking that. My head is like a sieve or something.

This weekend I started working on re-bagging a large portion of my cels…which is a task I started a few months ago but then it got put on hold for a while because I ran out of appropriately sized cel bags (which I finally remedied thanks to the helpfulness of Rei The Jelly, thanks so much!!)

Right smack in the middle of rearranging my #1 Itoya I turned the page and literally went “WTF??” I was staring at a cel that most definitely was not uploaded into my gallery, and what’s more I couldn’t even remember owning in the first place.

Now…I do have a handful of cels that I never bothered to scan… They are all primarily misc. unknowns or freebies that didn’t really seem worth showing off (in fact I would like to get rid of them!! If anyone would take ’em off my hands I would gladly pay for the shipping and everything.) This however wasn’t one of those. It was a Weiß cel…the whole focus of my freaking collection.

How the heck did I manage to pick up a Weiß cel and NOT bother scanning it?? What’s more, it looks to me like it’s from the same sequence as a set of sketches I’ve owned for years and years (Omi’s running with Yohji and Ken in episode 23.) I remember buying the sketches. Not the cel.

The really sad thing is, I’m pretty sure I had this exact same ‘WTF’ moment a few months ago when I started re-arranging the storage of my collection the first time. And yet I still managed to not get around to scanning it and re-forget I owned it.

I’m pretty sure I’ve had it for a minimum of 4+ years already…simply because I know I didn’t buy it in 2009 and I acquired so few cels between then and 2006 and then that I definitely would have remembered it (or at least scanned it before flaking out.) Having tried very hard to recall where it came from, I get the feeling I bought it directly from another collector over at Animanga, back when that place was still really active. I don’t think it came from an auction. But that’s all I’ve got, otherwise my mind it utterly blank. Mysterious cel is mysterious!!

So today I updated with two cels of Omi. I only expected to be adding one Omi cel. But there was apparently a surprise!Omi waiting for me, haha.

I’m not complaining of course. ^__^

Okay, fine. I surrender.

last modified: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 (2:54:05 PM CST)

Okay well…I think it is finally time to officially accept the fact that I have gotten thoroughly re-addicted to cel collecting. Oh dear. When I first discovered the hobby back in 2003 it reeled me in pretty hard and fast. I was a college student back then and couldn’t really afford to keep up with my addiction, so after a very expensive year and a half or so I had to cope by almost entirely cutting myself off from even looking at cels. I still really liked all of the ones I had, but I just couldn’t let myself be tempted to buy any new ones.

That worked pretty well, actually. I went several years where I only acquired the random one or two when I saw dealers in person at cons. Or accidently stumbled across the spare one on ebay.

I’m really not sure what was the trigger, but a couple of months ago I couldn’t help myself from starting to look again. And I jumped right from never buying anything to pouncing on a long standing wishlist item. At that point I was pretty much done for. I kept telling myself I was only going to get a few things and then slip back into my usual quiet lurker mode. Heh, yeeeaaah right. It’s been half a year now and I’m probably worse than ever. Time to face the facts that I’m quite solidly addicted again. I’m probably going to be hanging around here for a while.

I don’t think I’ll be using this blog feature too frequently, as I already have a regular journal elsewhere…. But every now and then I do feel like talking strictly about cels, so I figured I’d start using this as an outlet, being a more appropriate place for that. Way back in my early collecting days I used to be pretty social. I’ve seriously been nothing more than a lurker now for so long that I don’t even fall on the cel collecting radar anymore. I might start trying to talk to people again. If I can get over being shy, heh. Well anyway, I’m finally officially announcing my presence, even if I continue to be on the quiet side. So…hi!

Anyway, suddenly changing gears there, I’m in the process of trying to teach myself flash animation for my work. (It’s really difficult to do without an instructor, let me say that.) Wow, does it ever give me a new perspective on my interest in cel collecting. There are so many shortcuts where the computer does the work for you, filling in between the key frames, etc. And yet…it’s –still- so complex and tedious. I really can’t even imagine trying to animate something traditionally. I was always baffled by how it must be done, but I’m gaining a whole new level of respect for the people who painted all of these lovely pieces of plastic.

Okay then, that’s all for now I guess. If anyone ever feels inclined to geek out over Weiß Kreuz feel free to drop me a line. I haven’t really changed much in the past 6 ½ years, ha.