"Gamekeeper" is growing

Or, I do still knit:

I'm almost done with the second repeat of "Aragog" (There are five repeats each of three different patterns: one knit/purl, one lace, and one cabled). I may or may not do the full five; it will depend on if I seem to have enough yarn and also if the scarf will be too long with the five repeats.

It's still way too hot to even think about wearing scarves. We had a heat index over 100 today. It was fairly miserable. And we had a dewpoint of 77 for part of the day, which is really miserable and is about as high as I've ever seen it.

Also, I got a call from the Bloomington, IL post office. The woman there was very friendly and helpful and said it was "concerning" that two cards mailed to the same zip code a couple months apart would both have gone missing. She gave me the phone number of the postal inspector and I called them. (To my surprise, there was still someone on duty after 4:30 pm Central time). The woman there was also very helpful, took down the two addresses I had mailed to and told me:

a. my local post office WILL get in touch with me and if they do not I need to call the inspectors back
b. A postal inspector MIGHT call me if they need more information, but if they have what they need they won't.

Apparently they are going to look into it. She agreed that one card going missing was probably 'the machinery ate it' but two going missing looked suspicious. She also said that they liked to have people call about this stuff - even over cards with NO money in them - because it's the only way they know that something's going wrong. (And anyway: I feel like if you can't trust the mail not to be stolen from, you might as well just give up on your nation and culture.)

She did note that they get a lot of reports of stolen cards close to Christmas, especially from people's personal mail boxes, because crooks think there might be money or gift cards in them. Which is kind of awful but also tells me if I am EVER sending a gift card to someone, to put it in something that's not obviously a greeting card AND to send it from the post office directly. (I would never send cash in the mail, regardless of what my grandma did.)

I also mailed off the first two sets of cards today: one set from the mail slot at the post office (they will go out today, as mail is picked up at 4:30), the other set from an on-street blue box (they will go out tomorrow as the mail is picked up at 2:45 pm). I will send the remaining three cards one-at-a-time from my personal mailbox. I have a list of whose cards went how, so when people get back to me I will be able to see if any of the cards went missing.

Though the fact that cards I sent went missing but not bills I paid makes me wonder if maybe it WAS someone in the 61761 zip code messing with things, or if it could have been a random, bizarre, "the sorting machine ate TWO cards" coincidence.

And at any rate: if none of the cards go missing, people I know get fun mail.