Morton Fox's journal

I shipped the second pair of boots to Columbia Sportswear for warranty repair this morning. I got two pairs of those boots in the Marty's closing down sale. So when the first pair split apart, I sent those back to Columbia Sportswear and starting using the second pair. Now the second pair has broken the same way too and so off they go. I'm now using the weird shoes from Steve & Barry's that have both velcro and laces. Hope these last longer.

I had trouble reaching the Encompass agent after getting the estimate but I got a little further on the insurance claim today. With Encompass Insurance, once you start a claim, you deal with the claim only through one insurance agent. The problem is the agent doesn't pick up the phone. So you have to leave a message and wait by the phone for a callback that may not come the same day. That felt like I was back in the pre-Internet era. Anyway, I finally got a callback more than a day after I left the first phone message, so I now have a car rental reservation arranged and paid for by Encompass to cover the two-day repair period. Whew.

After one week of travel via UPS Ground, my boots have arrived at Columbia Sportswear Warranty Department. I've been following their progress using TrackThis, which sends me notifications via Twitter. If you're on Twitter, give it a try the next time you're sending or receiving a package.

Postcrossing update: I'm now up to 543 postcards sent, 512 received, over 4 million kms of sent distance, and 8th on the country leaderboard. It's still a lot of fun, although my postcard collection has now filled up two boxes and is starting on a third box! Yesterday, I got a postcard from a rather remote location. This card is from Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China, a sparsely-populated area in the middle of the Asian continent.

Another postcard I got was interesting more for its postage stamp than for the card itself. This hologram stamp was on a postcard from Finland. My scanner doesn't do the hologram justice. If you tilt the stamp, it looks like the skier is skiing down the slope.

And lastly, here are my current postcard stats by country:

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As I mentioned in this journal, I bought two pairs of Columbia Sportswear size 16 boots at Marty's closing down sale in early November. I didn't actually start using these boots until December because I wanted to wear out the pair that I was already using. The Columbia boots are the most comfortable boots I've ever had. Unfortunately, they are defective. The stitching started coming apart on first use and they continued splitting open the more I wore them out on hikes in December. Some pictures...

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The inner layer is still fine and still waterproof but the outer shell is in bad shape. I doubt Ma Boyle would approve. Since Marty's is no more, I can't return the boots but I checked the Columbia Sportswear website and found out that I can ship these back to their warranty department for repair. The snag is I'll be out the shipping cost so I'm taking a chance that they'll fulfill their warranty. In the meantime, I'll use the second pair of boots, which I hope is not similarly defective.