I’m having a fight with an on-line company called Zazzle and spending inordinate amounts of time on it. Either I’m crazy or they are. I ordered the above mug for my Arrowhead retreat next weekend and fourteen mugs arrived but not in the size I ordered. They were 8 ounce mugs and I had ordered 11 ounce mugs like the ones I had for the Montana retreat last year. I won’t bore you with the complications of returning fourteen mugs, but taking the above photograph was part of it. I then received an email saying that they don’t sell 8 ounce mugs so obviously I had received the 11 ounce mugs and if I reordered I’d get the 11 ounce mugs again. So I got out a measuring cup and measured water into the mugs. 8 ounces went into the Arrowhead retreat mug and 11 ounces went into the Montana mug. I called R. into the kitchen to witness this. You’re right, he said. 

I once wrote and published an essay about the trauma of packaging up and returning a jacket to J.Crew . Somehow I believed I’d look like one of the J.Crew catalog models wearing this jacket but instead I looked like a large beige box.

To Do: write for 5 minutes about trying to return something.  It’s lovely when you can turn abject frustration into an essay – or a blog post.