Sorry ’bout the extended period of radio silence there – we are not avoiding spies here in Juniorvania, and be not afraid that I have sawn off my blogging digits. The cause of my virtual muteness has been much more prosaic than any of that; the last two weeks have been crazy busy at work and around the ol’ homestead. The charity auction Spouse and I were organizing went well, and 36 hours later we did the 36km bicycle ride that is associated with the event. Later that afternoon, we began a five day home improvement blitz with the help of both Spouse’s and my parents, focussing our efforts for the time being in the back 40. Pictures, of the “before and after” variety, have been taken and will be posted at a future date.
Meanwhile, things couldn’t have been busier at work last week; we had spent a couple of days away from the office focussing on our charity event, and the messages, emails and letters kept on piling up while we were gone. So the week before last was a bit of a scramble trying to catch up.
It was busy, and last Saturday we were at Wit’s End. That’s not just the way we felt, it’s also the name of the eventing venue that we visited for an FEI World Cup event last weekend (I took a bunch of pictures and will post some later this week). I spent last Sunday writing all day on a work-related project, and during the week, I was still finding it hard to get caught up at work. Every night when we got home, I would stare at the computer for a few minutes, then go pass out on the couch; I just didn’t have it in me to spend more time trying to make sentences at the keyboard. There have, of course, also been a number of debates to watch in the evening over the last week/week and a half.
I had hoped to spend a little more time posting about all of this frenzied activity today, but a portion of Sunday’s unallocated free time had to be dedicated instead to a home repair project. It seems that on Friday night, the People’s Mailbox was the chosen venue for “Mailbox Baseball”. The shiftless rural ne’er-do-well who was in the batter’s box evidently walloped a monster homer, because we couldn’t even find the thing anywhere along the road when the search party was dispatched earlier today for the express purpose of retrieving our battered postal receptacle. End result: an unscheduled trip to Lowe’s, an unbudgeted expenditure from the capital improvement fund ($34.99 for the extra large model and about 12 bucks worth of adhesive number decals to denote the Juniorvanian addressing co-ordinates on each side), and an hour-and-a-half worth of sawing (wood for the base), screwing the thing on to the roadside post, and cleaning up after myself.
I am unimpressed by the athletic prowess of the brainless prats who felt the need to trash my property. All I can say is this: it’s a good thing Spouse and I remembered to collect the mail from the box on Friday evening when we arrived home from work, because there was (quite unexpectedly) a sizable government refund cheque sitting inside the mailbox. Had we forgotten to get the mail that night (we’ve done that before), our mailbox and our happy little windfall would have been golfed away to God knows where, and we would have been none the wiser about the missing revenue.
We lived in Davis while theVet was becoming the Vet, our last two years there in a little duplex by the tracks; it was close to school, and downtown was just a short walk down the road, with its beguiling restaurants (our closest, a Pizza Hut takeout, started to recognize my voice). But it’s also the only place I’ve ever had my tires slashed — this, I believe, because I had the temerity to make eye contact with a couple of kids walking down our street as I was pulling up in front of the house, although I never heard anything later that night.
I suspect youth will be youth, and boredom leads to finding entertainment in mundane thrills: getting caught, not getting caught. For me, it was hooning about on back country roads in a ’78 Datsun with a worn clutch while well under the legal driving age; my brother rode in the bed of a pickup truck as they peeled out from every stop sign they could find.
I had a friend at Worldcom who, growing up, one month had their mailbox destroyed by someone running over it with a car week after week. Tiring of this, they devised a plan, taking the mailbox post down and using steel pipe embedded in concrete, then covering the result in wood to imply the same flimsy 4×4 holding up Uncle Sam’s love letters — a Trojan Mailbox, if you will. Later that night they were awoken by a huge crunch; the car that had been terrorizing their mailbox was now impaled on the pole.
I of course put in my share of time with youthful pranks – I remember making the predictable crank call to a local bowling alley, with the exasperated recipient of the call angrily inquiring, “Listen, you little fuckers, don’t you have anything better to do?”
The response was the most memorable one we ever got, because my friend and I were agreed that we did NOT in fact, have anything better to do.
A prank is a prank, and karma is a beeyatch, so I can’t be too upset about the whole thing, and I’m really not. I have resolved, however, not to be a victim of the same batter twice, so I too have begun planning the People Defence mechanism. I have been thinking about surrounding the box with a mesh of fishing line strung at high tension – just enough to form a spring-back effect on a bat swung in its direction (and with possible adverse consequences for the windows of the vehicle being used to transport the batter). This defence has the advantage of stealth, as the fishing line would be invisible under cover of darkness. Add this to the list of projects – I’ll keep you posted.
Mailbox Basebell. I remmber it well. We used to live in Campbellville on a country road and I got hit about 4 times. One night I was in my study and I heard the bang and the car peeling off. My keys just happened to be in frnt of me, the car for once parked facing out everything just ready to go. I ran out got in the car and chased the bastards down the oad and got the licence number. A quick call to Halton’s finest and i got a brand new mailbox driven up to me by one of the moms and a note from the culprits.
I never did put the new one on nefore we moved. So if you need a black mailbox never used, let me know….lol
@Joe:
I’ll keep you posted. So far, so good with mailbox v 2.0 – but Spouse and I have taken to reciting a little incantation, a sort of prayer for the survival of the mailbox once a day when we go past, so I think it’s safe to say that our spirits are in essence somewhat uncertain about the permanence of this particular fixture. Keep the black one polished up and ready to go….
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