11:43 – We drove out to Home Depot yesterday and picked up a steel shelving unit, which we’ll dedicate to food storage. We decided to get the 4-foot wide one rather than the 5-footer to leave more clearance for Barbara to get the lawnmower, lawn vacuum, wheelbarrow, and other farming gear in and out. Even the smaller unit provides considerable storage space, with 40 square feet of shelving in a unit 6’6″ tall. That’s about two cubic yards of storage space, enough for at least a full person-year of stored food.
USPS has struck again. I just shipped a kit to Canada, and they’ve changed their Click-N-Ship page. Until recently, there was an empty field where one could enter the Canadian postal code manually, in the form X9X 9X9. That’s no longer an option. This morning, I found that empty field had been replaced by a drop-down list, as had the field for city name. I was shipping the kit to Ottawa, Ontario. So I chose Ontario from a drop-down list, followed by Ottawa from another drop-down list. But when I got to the postal code field, my only options were to choose the first three characters, which in this case were K2A. There was nowhere to enter the remaining three characters. I figured that the USPS software would fill out the missing three characters, but when I printed the label they were still missing. The last line was “K2A Ottawa Ontario”. I wasn’t sure that was sufficient, so I manually printed the full postal code beneath the CANADA line.