{"id":6577,"date":"2012-10-26T20:26:57","date_gmt":"2012-10-27T00:26:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=6577"},"modified":"2012-10-26T20:26:57","modified_gmt":"2012-10-27T00:26:57","slug":"saturdays-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=6577","title":{"rendered":"Saturday&#8217;s Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I probably shouldn&#8217;t like getting mail. I get a lot of bills. But I still eagerly await the mail delivery, sometimes even on Sundays and holidays because I forget which day it is. And sometimes I&#8217;m rewarded with good mail, like cards and postcards from friends and family.<\/p>\n<p>Saturday, if not a good mail day, was at least an interesting one, with three items of note.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One was a $5.00 gift card to a grocery store. My husband had purchased a high-fiber cereal thinking it would be a healthy food for the kids. I ate some and was surprised by its sweetness. A close look at the ingredients list revealed that it contained aspartame. Nowhere else on the box was there any indication that it had aspartame. I was angry, so I called to complain. I hope they listened to what I had to say and will either remove the aspartame or mark the box more clearly. In any event, I&#8217;m glad we got our money back.<\/li>\n<li>The second item was a bill from a collections agency. The original bill had fallen off my radar and it would have been nice if they had at least called us before resorting to a collections agency. I certainly could have and would have paid them their $20.00 had they simply reminded me. I&#8217;d much rather have paid the original company than a collections agency. It&#8217;s sad that so many businesses operate this way these days.<\/li>\n<li>The third thing was <a title=\"On Writing\" href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=6430\">my much anticipated rejection letter<\/a>. It was a disappointment, actually, but not because my story didn&#8217;t get published. The disappointment was the boilerplate wording. In this letter was a list of reasons why a story might be rejected, and someone had checked off &#8220;doesn&#8217;t meet our current needs.&#8221; As feedback goes, it&#8217;s not terribly negative, but it&#8217;s also not terribly instructive. I wish they had included some explanation of what they <em>do<\/em> want.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So I&#8217;ve got $5.00 to spend and a check to write. Those things are easily done. But I also have an unwanted story and I&#8217;m not sure what to do with it. Publish it here? Look for another magazine publisher who might be interested in it? Attempt to illustrate it and turn it into a book for my kids? Tuck it in a drawer and forget about it? I&#8217;m not sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I probably shouldn&#8217;t like getting mail. I get a lot of bills. But I still eagerly await the mail delivery, sometimes even on Sundays and holidays because I forget which day it is. And sometimes I&#8217;m rewarded with good mail, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/?p=6577\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6577"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6577"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6602,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6577\/revisions\/6602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluefootedmusings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}