The Wayward Package Returns

Some of you will recall the saga of the Wayward SMOFCon Shipment that took nearly two weeks instead of two days to travel from the Bay Area to Austin. This afternoon I received an e-mail from a co-worker at my office in San Mateo advising me that the box finally made it back home yesterday, January 4. From the day I mailed it on December 1 until the day it arrived back in San Mateo on January 4, the only time it stood idle outside of the USPS was between its arrival in Austin December 12 and its redeposit in the mail on December 14. I'm sure glad there was nothing vital in it.

Mind you, I am partially to blame for not having insisted that Priority Mail labels be placed prominently on the package, so it got stuck in the ordinary parcel post system during the worst time of the year, but I'm still a bit miffed over spending the money for nothing.

Thinking of Bears

While on the United flight between Portland and Denver yesterday, I tuned away from the ATC chatter for a while to watch "The Great Salmon Run,", a nature documentary about the annual salmon run in Western North America. Among the interesting bits that made me think of Kuma Bear were shots of bears on station at a waterfall catching salmon in their mouths -- it actually looks like the fish are jumping into the bears' mouths. Also, I learned that while bears don't mind swimming, they apparently don't like getting their ears wet.