assorted things make a post

[edenfalling]

1. As of Monday, the smoke shop is now closing at 6pm (Mon-Sat) until our final day. Boss Lady looked at the hourly sales figures and figured there was no real point being open until 7pm just for two cigarette sales, one newspaper, and maybe a few random snacks. (For reference, cigarettes, newspapers, and lottery all have terrible profit margins -- 6% for lottery, 7% for cigarettes (assuming you sell at state minimum, which we do), and 6-10% for newspapers.)

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2. More smoke shop news: on Tuesday, the air conditioner's compressor blew out. :-( The landlords called a heat & AC company, but the fix could not be done until Thursday at the earliest because not all the relevant parts were in stock. I got a text from Boss Lady yesterday telling me that we had no AC and I should wear shorts... which confused me slightly, since I wasn't at work today either, and I certainly hope the problem will be fixed on Friday.

Also, I don't own any shorts. No really. None. I strongly dislike the way tight shorts feel and the way loose shorts look, so I don't wear them. Aside from three years of soccer in high school, I haven't worn shorts since I was twelve or thirteen.

(I don't like tight pants either, FYI. I just really dislike tight fabric around my thighs. It's sweaty and itchy and makes me feel like a dehydrating sausage, and I don't give a shit about trying to look sexy, so why bother flattering my butt and legs if it just makes me want to claw the fabric off and wrap a handy curtain around my waist as a makeshift skirt? /end digression.)

Anyway, I guess I'll discover the state of the air conditioning tomorrow.

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3. I have been gleefully plunging through the archive of Girl Genius, which I think makes that the third fandom Asuka has (inadvertently) dragged me into. I have also been gleefully plunging through the AO3 fic archive for that series. Spoilers, schmoilers. Who cares! It's fun!

I may say something more coherent about the series once I catch up to the current pages. Or not. But for now, I am enjoying it immensely. :-D

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4. Today I headed up to Cornell to do a couple tiny pieces of research for my dad's encyclopedia project. They're still in the editing phase, and Dad asked if I could find the birthdates of two scientists; one neglected to provide his birthday in a biographical article that he wrote himself, and also gave his birthplace as a local region name that does not actually have any legal validity; the other they had a year for, but no exact date or place. I was able to find the date and location for the first person, but nothing definite on the latter.

It always fascinates me that there are places that have names, but that aren't towns and/or don't have their own post office or ZIP codes, and don't appear on maps either. For example, near where I grew up, there is a place called Convent Station. It is named after, unsurprisingly, a train station built near a convent. If you say, "I'm going to Convent Station," anyone local will know what you mean... but it's not a town, it has no ZIP code, and generally it has no legal status as a place. Kind of a glorified neighborhood. Anyway, that won't do for an encyclopedia, apparently, since places like that are hard to find and/or verify. (Not being legally incorporated, they presumably cannot hold records like birth certificates.)

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5. I meant to make pot roast yesterday, but I forgot to buy the necessary red wine on my way home from my adult RE program at church in the evening. And then today I forgot again. So I will pick that up tomorrow after work.

In the meantime, I've been working my way through the random leftovers Mom brought. First was a peculiar soup -- vegetarian meatballs in chicken broth with white beans and carrot and cheese and spinach leaves. That made two meals. The white chicken chili also made two meals. Now I am eating some baked chicken with a weird breading, supplemented by broccoli I bought myself and steamed tonight. And after that, there's some kind of pork in broth; I don't remember the details.

I find it amusing that Mom apparently thinks I would starve and/or get scurvy if she didn't supplement my diet now and then. Or maybe it's just that, even years later, she's still used to cooking for four instead of for two, and enjoys giving leftovers to family. (Hmm. I should ask Vicky if she gets leftover deliveries as well, or if Mom thinks she can handle her own cooking. Vicky, unlike me, actually enjoys cooking for its own sake instead of regarding it as an annoying and tedious interval that separates being hungry from being able to eat dinner.)

Comments

[monkey5s]

Re: 4., our library always was on the lookout for any "ghost towns" books for our area. The most recent one I knew of was still valid when I first moved up here in, um, 1969? Three different crossroads, in tight proximity, were North Condit, South Condit, and Condit Station. North Condit and Condit Station have kind of been absorbed into a designation of "Condit", but South Condit still has its "town" sign. There are many, many, MANY little places around here that were valid locations until the post office consolidated and, uh, killed off most of the little bitty villages. But their signs still remain. Depending on which way I drive to my brother's house, I either pass through Fargo or Mount Liberty AND Olive Green (Olive Green lost its post office in the 60's sometime). People doing historical and genealogical research have to dig quite a bit sometimes.

[edenfalling]

Genealogy is not my personal field of interest, but I greatly respect the patience and effort that goes into it!

In this particular case, I think it's not that the post office killed a village -- more that the "village" in question never actually incorporated itself and thus was never legally an independent place. So legally speaking, the person in question was born in either whatever neighboring town/village shared its ZIP code with the non-place, or in the surrounding township at large.

[sabriel]

All mothers thinks their children will starve/get scurvy if they don't supplement their children's diets. On a 5-day vacation to Japan my mother loaded me bundles of fruit, never mind that I keep telling her I can buy fresh in Japan, Japan is not devoid of fresh fruits, and I'll need to finish it all before passing through customs in Japan or they're not going to let me through.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, bringing fresh fruit through customs is generally frowned upon. *wry* But at least we know they care. :-)

[redwolf]

The non-official town thing is odd to me and I can't think of a local example.

Here, if you get enough mail, you get your own postcode. Typically, this would apply to large businesses and the postcode is different to one associated with a state.

As for non-official towns, the closest parallel I can think of is real estate agents. There's an old house near where my Nan lived that's now used for functions. Rather than use my Nan's suburb when selling houses, real estate would refer to surrounding houses by the fake suburb of the house name. Weirdly, they ended up making this official.

I guess the same thing would be businesses claiming to be based in the non-existent East Sydney, rather than Kings Cross or Woolloomooloo, but this is making up places rather than being invisible to the postal system. Different countries; different geographical strangeness.

[edenfalling]

Ah, I phrased that badly, sorry. Obviously people who live in those places get mail, and the physical locations themselves are included in ZIP codes. It's just that they don't have their own, unique ZIP codes; they get lumped into neighboring communities that have been legally incorporated into towns and so on. But searching for a place-name that isn't attached to a legally recognized entity is difficult because informal names don't make it onto maps.

Here's how it works: Let's imagine there is a small cluster of houses and a gas station in Parable Township, near where a county road crosses a river. Its residents call this place Example Crossing, but it's never been legally incorporated as a village or town, so their ZIP code is the one for the village of Sample, two miles to the west, and they are legally considered residents of Parable Township at large rather than any specific incorporated entity within that township. And you won't find Example Crossing on any maps or legal records, so if someone says they were born in Example Crossing, it is really hard to verify that, since Example Crossing does not, legally speaking, exist.

I guess a really big businesses could get its own ZIP codes, though more often they'll get a particular four-digit suffix to the main code. (Technically all US ZIP codes are nine digits long, but for most everyday purposes -- you know, stuff that doesn't involve tax returns or similar fiddly documents and/or agencies -- all you need is the first five. I don't even know the final four digits of my own ZIP code, and I bet most people don't either.) I know Cornell University has its own ZIP code -- 14853, just one digit removed from the city of Ithaca's 14850 -- and that probably holds true for most universities.

[redwolf]

Okay, that makes sense. Two suburbs share my postcode. However, the neighbouring suburb shares its postcode with 11 other suburbs. Same kind of thing. Weirdly, I notice that the big mall, while sharing a postcode, is designated as a suburb name in its own right.

We have four digit postcodes, the first digit denotes the state. Postcodes starting with 1 are special postcodes belonging to places with a lot of incoming mail.

The whole incorporated township thing is a little alien. I understand the logic, but suspect there's a completely different legal framework here. New suburbs are related to new land releases, suburb names would likely be suggested by development groups, but they do need to be approved at a state government level. The postal service would allocate a postcode, likely sharing one nearby. They'd belong to an existing council by default.

It would be unlikely that a new town would crop up in a remote region here. Mining would be the exception, but again that may just grab an existing nearby postcode.

Just looked it up and it's the postal service that owns postcodes and can do whatever it likes with them. Apparently, they can kill off or change postcodes to suit their network too. I can't remember that happening to a postcode, but it did happen to Mum's phone number when they expanded a local exchange. I guess if they added or removed a major mail distribution centre, they could shuffle postcodes.

Although, all of our differences are still sane in comparison to the wackiness of the City of London.

[edenfalling]

Here is a Wikipedia link discussing unincorporated communities in the United States -- in the US, municipal incorporation basically means getting a charter from the state to set up a municipal government instead of being governed directly by the state or county. The details vary from state to state, and there's often a sort of sub-division called a township (or town, in New York, just to be confusing) which is where you take a county and chop it into pieces and call each piece a self-governing entity... which can then have smaller (by area, though perhaps larger by population) incorporated municipalities within it.

This muddle of overlapping and interlocking jurisdictions interacts oddly and awkwardly with the postal service and the ZIP code system, as you can imagine. *wry*

Anyway, you can build a new community wherever you can buy the land and get zoning permission, but it will, as you said, belong to an existing jurisdiction by default... until and unless its inhabitants decide to incorporate, and get permission from their state government. I suspect this process has become more complicated over time; during the 1800s, it roughly amounted to sending someone to the state capitol to say, "Here's the survey map showing the location of our new town and here are the land deeds to show we purchased it legally. We have 250 inhabitants, we elected a mayor last month, and we'd like to call the place Awesomeville. Okay? Cool."

[cat-i-th-adage.livejournal.com]

@ 2: Cotton skirt maybe? Something light and floaty? (It's winter in my part of the world, and instead of skirts I'm layering merino skivvies. Every sunny day is a gift, right now.)

[edenfalling]

Mr. Speakerphone and the landlord are deciding whether it's worth it to fix the AC when it will all be torn out in a few weeks anyway. *sigh* Saturday and Sunday shouldn't be too bad, but if we still have no AC next week, I will definitely go with skirts.