New Mailbox

The Final Project

This spring break has been pretty crazy… but nonetheless extremely productive.  I mostly wanted a pretty chill weekend, but that didn’t exactly happen.  Firstly for some reason I got it in my head that I wanted to change out the mailbox yesterday.  I should have really taken a picture of it before we started, because it was leaning forward and to one side… and had been that way for the better part of the fifteen or so years we have lived in the house.  The door was almost always leaning open because of the tilt, which really didn’t do much to keep our mail dry and safe.  Not to mention it was a post… with a notch inexplicably cut into the side… and the box itself was hanging loosely from a bracket.  On a whim the other day I started looking at options and finally settled on the step 2 fake rock model you see above.  The big thing that I liked about it is the fact that if you go on vacation you can remove the bottom of the mailbox and all of the mail drops down into a larger locked chamber below.  The mailbox is fairly square with the world… my picture taking in the bright sunshine…  not so much.  I relied heavily upon the expertise of my dad, but he was mostly there in an advisory role… which meant I  got to do the bulk of the work.  I am super thankful for him coming over though,  if for no reason other than the fact that he had a really nifty auger tool for essentially “drilling” the post hole into the ground.  That alone saved so much time and effort that I could just corkscrew down and pull out plugs of earth…  or in my case super wet and dense clay that was kinda hell to chew through.

The postive there however is that since it was really dense clay, we could simply pack it back in tight around the post rather than pouring in some quickcrete to stabilize it and set it up.  It took about two and a half hours from start to finish to remove the remnants of the old post, dig a new hole beside it, set the post and install the “easy to install” mailbox.  The last step honestly felt like it took the longest because the manufacturing tolerances were not quite like one would hope.  A lot of the steps involved us banging pieces of plastic together trying to get them together.  After a bunch of frustration… and what would have been a lot of cursing had my parents not been around.  We got the mailbox up just in time for its first delivery, which happened sometime before we had the black top on it.  When we finished with the mailbox I decided we should probably go finish the rest of the errands before I collapsed, which just involved a trip to Sams Club and a trip to Aldi.  As we were coming back from Aldi we got word that our neighbors father had fallen off a ladder and broken his pelvis.  So instead of settling in for the evening to relax, we went up to the hospital to visit and since our neighbor was stuck out of town… we tried to fill in as best we could.  This process took long enough that I was roughly an hour late for recording aggrochat… and even though we had a slew of technical difficulties we just went with it…  because ANY show is better than no show, or at least that was my stance last night.

Relaxation Day Hopefully

So needless to say… yesterday was pretty damned hectic.  It feels good however to have accomplished as much as we did over a pretty short period of time.  My hope is to mostly just chill out today, and I am wearing all the flannel I can muster because it is pretty chilly in the house.  I really do not want to have to turn on the heat, because I know come next week we will be back in reasonable temperatures.  It is once again Black Spindle day in Destiny, but I am thinking that ship has sailed.  Two weeks ago Squirrel and I struggled to try and get someone to help with that all day long, finally only getting some assistance about 6 pm…  with my end time needing to be 8 pm.  My goal is not to sit around waiting all day to see if that happens and instead go off and enjoy myself in other games.  Not that Destiny is not enjoyable… I just hate waiting around for something.  Right now I have a 1000 Yard Stare that I really like, and the raid Sniper Rifle and between them… I am okay.  I am not planning on doing any content white nail enough to matter that the Black Spindle will make the difference.  I am enjoying casual raiding in Destiny, and I think that will be pretty much where I leave it.

As far as The Division… I am level 18 I believe or otherwise super close to it and still feeling like I need to play catch up.  I am enjoying myself especially now that I once again got a fresh infusion of weapons.  Man do new weapons make a huge amount of difference in this game because struggling… to taking things down in style.  One of the activities that I have been playing catch up on is the phone recordings… and I have to say some of them are just heart breaking.  Some are also showing me a side of characters that I completely without any reservation hated.  There is a phone call from the leader of the cleaners to his granddaughter, talking about how he had to do something for the city… and that she might hear some bad things about him… but not to believe them.  It kinda puts an entirely new spin on what I thought was a mad man, and felt completely happy about putting a bullet in his skull.  The game has a lot of grey area… and so far it has been enough to cause a good chunk of the AggroChat folks to bounce from the game.  For me… I am very much still enjoying myself, but I need to group up more so that I can see what that end of the game feels like.  Right now I kinda like wandering the streets like a nomad and righting wrongs.  Even though I am having to build that hero narrative for myself…  because what I am seeing out in the world is pretty bleak.