Mail

One thing that has been pretty frustrating about moving so many times in a short span of time is our mail situation. Because we have not yet had a place lined up before turning in the keys to the place we were leaving (something I don't plan to do ever again in the future after doing it already 3 times...you think I would have learned the first time around, but alas...), we have never had a smooth transition with our mail. From Arlington to Farmville we sent our mail to "general delivery" at the Farmville post office and checked for months without receiving a single thing. Because I had gotten in a car accident during the move (and with no current address just used my Arlington one assuming things would be forwarded) this created a HUGE problem about a year down the road when we started getting calls for payment of bills we had never even received. Chris had even contacted our old Arlington post office delivery person and spent hours on the phone with him and his supervisor trying to discover where our mail was going, but regardless, we never received a single piece of mail forwarded from there.

Since we had a two month gap between our first house in Farmville and our second, we ended up forwarding our mail from the first address to our parents' house, and two months later when we found out we would be moving back, forwarded it back down to Farmville. We still receive occasional mail at our parents' house. This move, we had about 6 weeks between leaving our second Farmville house and finding our current home in Williamsburg. Because of that gap, we forwarded our mail this time to Chris' work address and that seemed to work out all right. Overall though, mail ends up being kind of a disaster when you leave somewhere without a new permanent location lined up.

All that is to say that when our moving truck pulled up in front of our current home, I was shocked when the mailman ran up to us, introduced himself, and told us he had some stuff for us that he had been holding at the post office because he noticed we hadn't picked up the keys for our box yet. He already knew our names! AND perhaps even more impressively, in the almost two months that we've been living here, we have not once received a piece of mail that did not have our names on it - not one thing on which I've had to write "please forward" or "return to sender"...something I had to do weekly in each of the three place we lived prior to here.

In fact, our mailman goes so far as to cross out in pen whatever the name of the person who lived here before us and circle "current resident" prior to delivering the piece of mail to us. I mean, I think we may have super-mailman.