Before I could walk out to the end of the driveway to pick up my mail this afternoon, I had to give myself a little pep talk.

“It’s just rain,” I told myself. “It’s just mud. It’s just a gale-force wind blowing the rain in your face so you can’t see how to step around the mud.”

Even with all this positive thinking, it took me an hour to work myself up to walking out the front door. I was sort of hoping there would be a break in the storm and I could dash between heavy blasts of rain. Yeah, that didn’t actually work out. All it did was get darker and closer to the time when I’d have to take a flashlight along.

Was it worth it? Well, I did get soaked through, but it’s not as if I don’t have plenty of towels. Besides, I got a haircut last week, so it was a lot easier to dry my head than it would have been in January. And there was mail. I got:

• The latest Entertainment Weekly, with an Oscar nomination rundown. (Woody Harrelson was nominated, but not for Zombieland?)
  
  
• The latest Book-of-the-Month Club mailer. (I’ve already declined this month’s selections on line, and in fact I haven’t bought anything from them (other than cookbooks and graphic novels) since I got my Kindle.)
  
  
• And a letter from the former Saturn dealer, letting me know that even though they’re now a Chevy dealer, they still want to service my 2003 Ion. And why wouldn’t I keep going there, since the Boss pays my service bills?