De-Blippifying Blippettes

Last week was a bad week for me in the blippette department: 1) lost wallet; 2) precious package destroyed by the U.S. Post Office; 3) all my tax documents, en route to my tax-whiz sister, somehow sidetracked to a U.S. Post Office processing center in Palatine, Illinois, where they have languished for the past week; 4) water leaking from somewhere outside the house into the attic and down through the ceiling light fixture into the kitchen and dripping onto the kitchen table.

Too many blippettes!

But I am here to report that three out of these four blippettes turned out to be much less blippy than originally supposed.

1) It took me only three hours, all told, to replace the contents of the lost wallet. Lines at the DMV were remarkably short - indeed, there were no lines whatsoever. I walked right up to the counter and had my new license in fifteen minutes. And now I am set until 2024. Replacing my University of Colorado ID took longer, as it involved a walk across the sprawling campus, but hey, I like to walk. I was told I'd be charged $25 for the new ID, but instead I was charged just $5. Not so terrible!

2) I will mourn the loss of the precious package always. But there is a strange relief in realizing that nothing can be done about it, nothing at all, except to grieve.

3) Every single day for the past week I've gotten the same message from the tax-package tracking (with date and time altered for each one):
The Postal Service has identified a problem with the processing of this item at 4:07 pm on March 7, 2019 in PALATINE IL DISTRIBUTION CENTER. The local facility has been alerted and is taking steps to correct the problem.
But I have come to realize that the needed steps are not indeed being taken, because they are so ridiculously easy that if they had been taken the problem would have been solved instantly: either mail the package on to my sister or mail the package back to me. So instead I've taken steps to replace the needed documents, which also turned out to be not that huge of a hassle at all, once I realized I had to do it. I was reminded of this line from my writer friend Laura Deal: "Activity is the antidote to anxiety." Now I am mildly amused by the daily texts from the Postal Service, rather than consumed with sick dread and impotent rage.

4) The roofer who installed the roof came to look at the leak, and it's NOT the roof that's leaking, it's some other problem with the gutters, and the heating cable that was supposed to be melting the ice in them but has failed. He has been extremely helpful and jolly in diagnosing the problem and figuring out to fix it.

Oh, blippettes, you were, for the most part, so small after all, and yet I wasted so much time agonizing about you. Mark Twain is quoted as saying, "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened." Well, my blippettes happened, but they turned out to be not so blippy, after all.

I created the word "blippette" for problems that were too small to qualify as blips, but maybe I need a new word for problems that don't even qualify as blippettes: maybe just "ettes" - though I don't see that catching on. So I'll stick with "blippettes," but try to keep them in perspective (and hope that no new ones come my way in the coming week).