I did something today that I haven’t done in a very long time.
I licked a postage stamp.
I filled out forms to get a refund for the credit on my and my wife’s Opal cards, the stored value cards used on Sydney’s public transport system. We no longer need them because they’ve updated the scanners to work with any debit/credit card, and it’s more convenient to do that (in fact using Apple Pay) rather than carry an extra card around all the time. To get our stored value back, we need to physically mail the cards in, which means using an actual envelope and postage stamps. I dug out our antique postage stamps that we last used maybe 10 years ago, and looked up the current cost to mail a standard letter, which turned out to be $1.20. And lo! We had a few $1 stamps and some 20 cent stamps still sitting in our drawer. The $1 stamps were self-adhesive, but the 20 cent ones were old fashioned lick-em-and-stick-em.
Today I also spent time packing almost 3 kilos of Magic: the Gathering cards to send overseas to people who bought them from me. Here’s one kilogram of cards (minus enough to add packaging and keep the total just under 1kg):
And here’s two kilograms of cards:
And I learnt a thing. If you’re sending Magic cards from Australia to the USA, you can streamline things by filling out an online customs form. There’s a field asking you to enter the type of item so it can determine the HS Tariff Code. You can start typing “card game”, and it pops up a drop-down list and you can select from:
- card game
- collectible card game
- game cards
- and a few other less relevant things
Whatever you do, you should NOT select “collectible card game”. Because it gets flagged as some sort of restricted item, and the Post Office refuses to send it. I redid the form on my phone while the staff member was on the phone to the head office (fruitlessly), and all I changed was my selection on that drop down, and I asked them to reprocess it, and it went through without a hitch. I mentioned this to my friends when I got home, and one found that “Collectibles” is one of the restricted categories in Australia Post’s list of Bad Stuff You Can’t Mail. We surmised probably because of money laundering or something. Anyway, lesson learnt!
Finally, the solution to yesterday’s puzzle! I can proudly announce that nobody—none of the commenters here in the blog, nor any of my friends who I also quizzed on our Discord chat—managed to guess the correct word. Incorrect guesses include:
- Beuer
- Fever
- Leven
- Gwen
- Zeuen
- Leuen
- Tavern
- Eleven
- Forever
- Tower
- 7even
The correct answer is … “Even”.
Yeah.
New content today:
Here in the States we have “Forever Stamps”, which are worth “one first-class letter of postage.” If the cost of postage rises, forever stamps are still valid. I have 20 here, which are about six years old. I mail about four items per year, so they’ll last a while.
That’s a lot of banding in the first picture!
Those cards are quite nostalgic to me! I have a lot of them in a box, stored away. A couple of years ago I sold most of the cards which had any value, mainly Revised dual lands and some assorted Legends and The Dark cards. Maybe I should also sell the rest aa bulk.