Dreamylife – The Going's on in Beautiful Glade Valley NC

Note: This post has been backdated from the original time it was written to properly provide a context to the posts that follow it;

My wife retired from the wonderful world of Government (and I suppose, I did in some ways as well) on September 30, 2021. We found a beautiful undeveloped property in the Blue Ridge mountains in the cozy community of Glade Valley and purchased the property in May of 1921 in preparation for our plans. Naturally, given the property was raw land, we had to do some work to include building a new office building for my little online business, a storage building, and living area, well, septic, power, etc. We have also cleaned up the woods, added a garden and quite a number of improvement which continue to this day.

Alas, our property is not really the topic of this blog or this post….The purpose of this post is the first step in documenting an ongoing battle with the Sparta NC post office that has been going on for right about a year. The main purpose of documentation is to make the information easily accessible to Executives at USPS, members of Congress, and members of the US Senate with whom it is my plan to write and advocate to in order to institute change in how the USPS does business, especially with small home based businesses such as mine.

Sparta, North Carolina 28675 PostOffice

Given I was not writing notes about the subject back in the day, I will have to generalize time lines. Given in the past I was not requiring written documentation, communications between myself and the Sparta NC post office are general understandings from my recollections and view point as to what was said and or agreed to. So to start, somewhere between approximately October of 1921 and December of 1921 I traveled down to the Sparta Post Office to find out what I needed to do to start mail delivery to our newly addressed property. The counter clerk gave directions, which I followed, that were actually very simple; put your mailbox in, and when you were ready, come back and let us know and we will begin mail delivery.

Well, as I said, that was simple and sounded great. I really wasn’t in a hurry, and we had already opened a PO Box as part of my business because I don’t like customers having my physical address and use a PO Box for return shipping information. I was still doing business online, just not aggressively. My plan had been, once we had things situated/settled on the property, to continue with my online business as an additional source of income and….I enjoy it.

Anyway, somewhere either in October or December, I went down to Lowes – and I have receipts, I just don’t feel it necessary to pull them out and get specific dates – purchased a bag of cement, a mailbox post, mailbox and numbers. I installed the mailbox outside of my office building as given my future plans for business that is where I felt the proper location for it should be. Once I had it setup, the next time I went into Sparta I let them know the mailbox was up, gave them the address and left. In no time at all, the mail began being delivered to our new mailbox location for the sum total of about a week – I seem to recall receiving two junk mail deliveries.

During this time, I had to do my quarterly North Carolina sales tax report, which is why I believe it was October or December based upon reporting deadlines. I put that in the mailbox with the flag up and there it sat. Given we did not have really anything being mailed to us, I did not think anything about it for about four or so days after it had still not been picked up. Alarms went off….