corn chili peppers beans squashes
The US Post Office’s rate change caught me off guard this year. I bought a whole sheet of commermorative stamps that arrived just as the rates went up. Rather than mess around with two-cent stamps, I decided to just hang on the sheet of Buckminster Fuller stamps for my collection and grab some thirty-nine-cent stamps. I pay most of my bills online, so I need stamps only rarely. I’ve going to the post office to buy stamps from a machine, but the machine has been down. I’m a bit of a stamp geek, so I won’t settle for just any lame US Flag stamp (besides, flags are a little too nationalistic for me at this time in history) but I don’t want to hassle the civil servants at University Station with showing me the commemoratives.
This morning I noticed that Flickr has partnered with a service that allows you have stamps made that feature your own photos. I could get custom-made stamps featuring these thistles in Purcell or this fence dog that has since been replaced by a parking lot. I’d expect there would a be a surcharge for custom stamps like these, but I got sticker shock when I looked at the prices. Zazzle charges $16.99 for a sheet of 20 stamps, which works out to about 85 cents a stamp, more than double the price of postage. If I were sending out wedding invitations or thank-you notes, perhaps I would consider buying these custom stamps, but these are way too expensive for my grad-student budget. I think I’ll settle for these “Crops of the Americas” definitive issues, which avoids too much nationalism and nods toward the indigenous peoples of America.
