he said, she said

throughout this wedding planning process, there have been a few things that didn’t go (or almost didn’t go) as planned. i just didn’t tell mike about it because i didn’t want him to bother him with those details or cause him to worry unnecessarily. case in point. i made the mistake of telling mike about my trip to the post office yesterday.

i arrived at the post office with my box full of invitations and weighed one of the envelopes. 0.8 ounces. yesss!!! i can use a regular $0.41 stamp on these babies! so i setup shop in the lobby of the post office and placed stamps on all of the envelopes. peel, stick, stack. repeat. thank gawd for adhesive stamps.

then i got in line to have our international invitations weighed and apply the appropriate amount of postage. ms. postal worker told me it would cost $0.90. ok, cool. then as she was affixing the stamp to the envelope, she felt the ribbon and promptly recalculated the cost to be $1.07. i protested, stating that the envelope was less than 0.25″ thick (which was the reason i was given for my bridesmaid luncheon invitations being more expensive to mail). she explained that the ribbon is not flat, preventing the envelope from being machinable.

i stared at my box full of stamped invitations, weighing my options. she followed my gaze and glanced at them, then back at me. should i inquire about additional postage costs and add a bunch of ugly stamps to each envelope? aaackkk! i stood there in silence for what seemed like at eternity. then i ran. i scooped all the invitations up off the counter and dumped them into the mail slot. they’ll just assume that i didn’t know, right? that’s my story and i’m sticking to it.

please let us know if you receive your invitation, and whether or not it got mangled when they tried to machine cancel it. also, please let us know if your mailman asks you for $0.17 in additional postage for special handling. we’ll reimburse you.

it’s true, the invitations were assembled, stuffed, and just mailed out. if you are invited, you should be receiving it soon. if you aren’t invited, well, heh, thanks for reading the blog! =P

there apparently is a small chance that every single one of our invitations are going to be sent back to us, though. this little bit of drama doesn’t appear to be worrying christi nearly as much as it is worrying me.

you see, standard postage for less than an ounce of mail is 41 cents. but, the USPS has a special category for envelopes with a rigid object in it. this rate is 58 cents. this is because these envelopes are not machineable, is what they say. so…our little invitation may fall into this category, in which case, i expect to see about 100 envelopes in my mailbox with a return to sender notice on them. that means that we’ll have to re-stuff envelopes…or worse yet, make new invitations if some of them got mangled in the process!

i’m crossing my fingers and hoping that it’ll be ok, i guess we’ll have to see!