ploupoc

I FOUND IT AGAIN. I read a post on Tumblr a while back on a particularly nicely done instance of color symbolism with Londo on B5, and I finally found it. (More beneath the cut.)

( Spoilers for the whole show )

I don't think I posted about this at the time, but there was an absolute odyssey involved in getting the original batch of B5 script books that I ordered.

The original process was this:

I'd known about the existence of the B5 script books vaguely for a while, but hadn't really thought of buying them before. In October, when I came back from traveling, I googled it and found a massive site called "B5 Books" that had authorized editions of all the B5-related books available, which was a lot of them, not just the script books but tons of other stuff as well.

They had closed yesterday.

But wait! They were staying open through the weekend (like 2 more days) because they'd had technical issues. So I splurged and ordered an absolute ton of books (about 2/3 of the total script books out there, mainly focused on episodes I especially wanted to read about). I would have preferred to order just one to find out a) what the books were like, and b) what their customer service was like, but ... closing in 2 days! So I gave them my credit card info for a quantity of books that I don't want to think too closely about.

A month went by.

I got a shipping notice and a tracking number, and and then a box arrived .... with 2 books in it.

I contacted customer service (a bit nervously, in the hopes they'd still actually answer). To their credit, they were very quick to respond; evidently there was a second tracking email I hadn't received for some reason, for the box with most of the rest of the books in it. (They sent me a free digital book to make up for the emotional distress, too - they were really nice.)

This was back in December, and I was leaving on the 13th, Saturday, so I periodically checked the tracking info for the box. It showed up in Fairbanks over the previous weekend, and showed that it was supposed to deliver on Monday.

Monday came and went. About mid-week, the tracking info showed that it had traveled out of Fairbanks again. (Why??) I had visions of the box going all the way back to the sender for some reason. Meanwhile, I had planned to spend the last couple of days before I left diving into my new books, but as the week ticked down and it continued to tease me ... I guess not. Finally, on Friday, I got an actual "out for delivery" notice, and then a notice that a "pick up at post office" slip had been left. Also, Friday was our last day of actual mail delivery (we'd put a hold on it until after Christmas that started on Saturday and went for 2 weeks, i.e. about the amount of time that the post office will hold a box - you know, this box with $100s of books in it). I was headed to the airport Saturday afternoon, but I figured it should be possible to stop by the post office on the way.

I picked up the mail.

No slip.

I thought, okay, maybe I picked up an early batch (yesterday's? our mailbox is on the highway and both the mail delivery and our collection of it is kind of haphazard) so when Orion got home a few hours later, I asked if there had been a slip in the mailbox.

Nope!

So now my package is on hold at the post office, I GUESS, with no ability to redeliver and our mail delivery not starting until after the approximate return to sender date. We hunted all around the mailbox just in case it had been dropped. No slip.

I ended up printing out the tracking number and taking that to the post office on our way to the airport, and that DID work and they DID have the box and I got it, YAY. (Orion said that the slip spontaneously showed up in the mailbox when he was headed home after dropping me off, so WHO KNOWS what was up with that.)

Anyway, all of that ended up working out in the end, and I enjoyed the books so much that I went on Amazon to see if I could find used copies of the ones I didn't have. I ordered a few more, and I just checked the shipping info and discovered that one of them - from a 3rd party Amazon seller - was sent via Fedex and supposedly delivered on Thursday afternoon, i.e. 2 days ago.

Guess what I don't seem to have!

Orion says that Fedex often leaves deliveries in random places around the yard - he's found them on piles of construction supplies, left at the door of the shop instead of the house, etc. Inauspiciously, it snowed a few inches last night, so everything is covered with fresh snow. Also, it was dark. Still, we took flashlights and went and hunted high and low in all the places that a package might be, ranging from likely (covered with snow beside the door) to unlikely but possible (at the doors of the various outbuildings like the greenhouse, on top of random vehicles in the yard) to the highly unlikely (at our road sign, in our mailbox). Not a single sign of it! I don't know if it was delivered to some other house, mistakenly marked as delivered when it's actually fallen under the delivery truck seat, or if a very soggy B5 book is going to turn up four months later when the snow melts, but seriously, WHAT EVEN. I've never had a book go missing like this in all the time I've been ordering used books off Amazon!

Anyway, further updates from the B5 script books are coming soon, and maybe I'll have this particular book eventually, or maybe not.