Three months ago, some guy sputtered up to our rusting mailbox and delivered someone else’s phone bill. Sombunall companies (phone, electric, and water are gubmint) deliver bills privately instead of using the government postal servicee (some irony there?). I don’t know which, since we get ours electronically (sometimes excessively). But two months ago, when the same bill arrived again, I went to tell them that I did not want this to happen again.

Which of course it did.

I did make an effort to find out to whom this bill should have been delivered, but didn’t get too far into that before hatching an alternate plan.

So here’s how I have chosen to advise the misguided mail carrier that the only bit of info he had right was the Manzana, or block. (No, you haven’t forgotten your high school Spanish: manzana does mean apple. I just live here, OK?)

Then came the presentation.

Style-wise, I’m of the school that says you can’t go wrong with duct tape. But if you think placing the offending bill across the opening where lazy doofus would cram it into mailbox is clever, you’re only revealing your northern-ness. It will not surprise me at all to see the next bill inserted behind this one.

Stay tuned….

No, not selling weed. Seeds, paraphernalia, maybe growing supplies. I didn’t even bother to look inside. I was showing some visitors around.

Uruguay legalized marijuana — sort of — in 2013.

You can legally grow six plants at home, but you’re supposed to register with the government, an idea which for some reason weed users (and people who remember the military rule) don’t universally embrace. You can join a cooperative and grow up to 99 plants. But no weed is available through pharmacies, as planned, because many pharmacies oppose the idea. (Because marijuana is so unhealthy, don’t you know.)

Unlike Jamaica, Uruguay has decided not to sell marijuana, if and when it’s ever available, to non-residents and non-citizens. However,

Montevideo is now littered with shops selling weed paraphernalia to both locals and tourists. A biscuit firm is marketing alfajores – the country’s national snack, two chocolate biscuits sandwiching a layer of dulce de leche – at dope users suffering the munchies. Its yellow “Marley” packaging seems to be in almost every convenience store, complete with a lion waving a Rastafarian flag and a large dope leaf. [source]

Needless to say, I’ve never seen one. Must be a Montevideo thing. Reminds me of the Macarena: the U.S. nationwide song craze that no one outside the Washington Beltway had ever heard of. But I digress.

Uruguay’s laudable marijuana initiative will hopefully pan out. Meanwhile, it’s looking — to me at least — as a well-meant, and welcome, move, that can only come to fruition through a miracle: the government bureaucracy actually allowing human beings to thrive. Here, as everywhere else, they seem to revel in doing the exact opposite.