Postal Mayhem

Generally mail is addressed and sent without much thought. So I was under the impression that the invitations would be no big deal. I was very wrong. I think back in elementary school we learned how to properly address envelopes. Perhaps this makes me dumber than a 5th grader because it is really hard.

I spent a good while researching this topic and came up with a very good explanation. It was about 6 pages long and detailed nearly everything you could think to come up. So then it was back to the address I was supplied by a lot of people. After the first couple I noticed something difficult. When you use one envelope you need to address it to all the guests. Well my Uncle Mike is married and has 5 kids. Can you imagine that addressee line, way too long. Also there are some guests invited that are coming with a relative but do not live with that relative. So the postal carrier may be confused. I really wanted all my addresses to be standardized so that the post office will deliver every invite without problems. My solution get an outer envelope.

The outer envelope is the mailing envelope and can contain general information to get it delivered. Then the inner envelope can contain all those invited by name and can make the whole invitation much cleaner. So Dan and I headed out to Office Depot in search of the outer envelope. This was not as easy as it sounds. Did you know that envelopes are standard for a reason. Yeah and we have a standard size inner envelope. That means the outer envelope would need to be bigger. Well no luck at Office Depot and so we trekked over to a party card supplier. We found envelopes here but they contained invitations and were quite expensive. We decided to give on last look at Staples and see what we could find.

Woohoo is all I have to say. They had a specialty envelope that was just large enough to fit our invitation into it but not overwhelming large that the invitation looks out of place. Thank goodness because I was getting nervous that we wouldn't be able to find it.

So the next step was the address. I went and put all the address into google maps to make sure they all returned a valid address. Then I proceeded to type up a mock address label. This way when I wrote them by hand (yes by hand) I wouldn't have to determine the format on the envelope. This has worked perfectly and I have a large chunk already addressed. Only two envelopes wasted. Hopefully the rest goes that smoothly.

All in all I would hate to be a postal carrier. It must be really difficult to deliver the mail and decipher people's handwriting and the way they happen to write the address. Whew I'm glad I looked it up cuz 5th grade was a long time ago.

Look for them in early August, I should be right on target now to get them out by the 6th.