So I go to the post office yesterday. This is a regular thing in my life since I sell books on half.com, so I'm there twice a week or so. And I'm up on what's coming out from the post office stamp-wise and like to plan to buy the commemoratives that I know are being issued; Arthur Ashe this year, and Yip Harburg, I got Marian Anderson already and the sickle cell stamp. And oh, oh, this year a block of four American scientists that includes Richard Feynman and Barbara McClintock and John von Neumann (hey I even know who these folks are. I'm so proud). And woven southwestern blankets and Latin dance. And a block which appears to celebrate the Constitution. Cool, huh? I avoid the bugs, the people-eating plants , the bats (I can deal with bats from a distance sure, but not that close up) and buy the flowers and jewelry and crafts and cool people. I'm skipping the "presidential libraries" stamp. And big surprise, no, no Reagan stamps chez roscoe. I know. You're stunned.

So I've been waiting weeks - WEEKS goddamit - for the block of stamps due out in March. Jim Henson. The Muppets. Are you KIDDING? Jim Henson was one of my all time heroes. And the MUPPETS folks, they're on STAMPS. Not just Kermit but the Swedish CHEF and Statler and Hilton and, oh man. So I've been bugging Cheryl and Connie all month. "Are they in yet, huh, huh?" It's a sheet with 11 stamps; 10 with various Muppets and one of Mr. Jim Henson himself.

Go in yesterday. Our friends at the post office have stalled on issuing the stamps. Maybe, says one, they're waiting for the next rate increase; maybe, says the other, there was a licensing problem. I'd LIKE to think the $^&!(*$# US Postal Service would arrange for releases before announcing a stamp was to be issued. I am so RIGHTEOUSLY pissed OFF. They pulled the $^^%&!(*$%!! stamps. NOW the post office page shows a SEPTEMBER release date. I've been waiting for this since I saw the sheet of 2005 releases months and months and months ago.

Honest to gods, it doesn't take much to please me, make me happy. Really, honest. A lousy sheet of stamps would have vastly improved a horrid awful sucky week where I possibly screwed up a friendship (probably) (by saying something that got taken SO the way I didn't mean it) and spending time in physical therapy, which probably won't help what's wrong. I just wanted Kermie and Piggy. Bastards.

Today's newspaper so did not help. There was a peachy article about the café in Seattle that has a picture of Mussolini on the wall that one owner says is there "just to inspire conversation". And says that Mussolini wasn't anti-Semitic because "he had a Jewish shoemaker and mistress". Oh, right. Oh, well that's okay then. And the other owner says "People have as much of a right to tell me to take the photo off the wall as I do to go into their house and ask them to remove things." Well, er no, not exactly.

I won't even go into the article on the current state of food in British schools, thanks to the Thatcher government's lifting of nutritional requirements; I'll just find reassurance that nothing much has changed with the story about the massive problems with the Stryker vehicle (apparently among other things it has problems with mud, but never mind). It brings back the good ol 'days, for those of you who missed Al Haig (though I know this sort of thing is never far from us); to quote the guy who's chief of the Army's (ready?) "Stryker Brigade Combat Team Integration Branch" who says that they're very proud of the "Stryker team" (whatever that may be) but admits "it hasn't been something that's problem-divorced."

Can I have a cookie?