Just a Few More Stamps

This past weekend was a home weekend, so I was able to get my spring letter out and with it the sign up sheets and order forms for our July workshop.

I usually get my spring letter out in April, but this one was held up a few days while we got some pricing for some of the items that are on the order forms in the packet.  I am once again struck by how truly blessed I am that many people have e-mail today.  I was able to get word out almost all of my Dragon Riders by e-mail, with what I thought was only twenty-six out of 178 needing to have their stuff mailed to them.  Isn't that great, I thought!  And how many copies and how much postage I have saved, not counting the wrist fatigue from folding all those papers.  Twenty-six copies, I thought, I can do that easy - yay!

But alas, my cheering was premature.  For when I sent out the e-mail to all the Dragon Riders (okay, technically, there are seven Chapters without Associate Matrons, so I sent an e-mail to those Chapters' secretaries in case they know who will be in the East next year and could pass on the workshop stuff, but let's not count them for now, since that was an easy e-mail), Lo, I discovered that I had ten bounces come back to me.  Ten of the e-mails on my list were rejected.  Now since serving in the Grand Line requires developing some tougher skin and making like a duck (letting stuff roll off your back like water), I did not take this personally. :-)  But I did print out the error messages and then I hand addressed envelopes for the people whose e-mail bounced (I don't have mailing labels for them because they are on my e-mail list and it is more bother for me to block copy all of them into the Word envelope) and stuffed the error message along with all the other papers into an envelope to let them know about the problem and in the hopes that they will get a new and working e-mail address back to me or find out what is wrong with their server.

Well, guess what?  My letter, with registration and order form happened to be five pages of paper.  Do you know what happens when you go to a sixth piece of paper?  You go up to the next mailing ounce and your postage goes up from forty-five cents to sixty-five cents. And unless you happen to have stamps with numbers on them (which I do, lots, so not so bad for me, but tough for others), you end up putting two stamps on and now you are paying ninety cents for that extra sheet of paper being in the envelope.  I think I managed to cut my losses down to seventy-five cents postage on each envelope, but hey, that's an extra dollar wasted.  Not a lot on the large scale, after all, compared to say six thousand dollars of fabric, but the little bits do add up over time.  And it's just the annoyance factor too, I suppose.

But at least the letters are off to everyone and I am already getting responses back - YAY!!!  The Associate Matron/Patron workshop is an annual fixture, so everyone is used to that and hopefully has planned for it and will come.  It is also usually the biggest workshop because both the ladies and the men are invited to attend, so I hope we get a great turnout.  We have lots of wonderful program planned, so it would be nice to have a full house to whom we could present it.

Next weekend, I am home again, to make a final big push on paperwork and organizing things and making up work hours at the office in preparation for doing the big nine day trip at the end of this month.