Finished one sage grouse report today, and got it in the mail to the boss (finally!), along with half the second report. Second should be done tomorrow.

Asked the postmaster if she had seen any mail leaking white powder lately.

Do that in a larger PO and you may get Security hauling your not-so-smily face off to the interrogation room. But here it got a sincere laugh.

She mentioned that they used to figure any package leaking a white powder was a shipment of drugs.

Dealers apparently like the USPS, since they, unlike UPS, cannot open a package to inspect it.

Did you know that about UPS? I didn't.

Anyway, we concluded that the current anthrax scare has probably made the drug shippers quite paranoid about their expensive packages. Probably adding a second layer of duct tape or so...

Little side benefits to everything.

She mentioned they have been officially authorized to wear rubber gloves and facemasks while handling the mail.

Really!

She isn't going to bother.

As she explained to her worried son, there have been four contaminated packages in a month's time. Out of a system that handles 240,000,000 pieces of mail a day. Kinda insignificant odds.

Not to mention that this country used to be considered the sheep capitol of the world. So our soils are certainly well endowed with anthrax spores.

If you've dug in the dirt or breathed the dust, you have almost certainly encountered the little beasties.

Only time I ever made it to the stand for consideration of jury duty (I usually get rejected at the questionnaire stage, where they ask if you have any close friends who are peace officers) was a case where a sheep rancher was suing a pipeline company.

He claimed to have lost a bunch of sheep to anthrax, which he was hoping to blame on the pipeline company, because of their digging their ditch in his pasture and stirring up the spores.

As soon as his lawyer got inquiring into my biology background, I was excused.

Damn. I wanted to be on that jury. Of course, that means he was right to excuse me...