19 Comments on “Your Thought For Today”

1. You could at LEAST include a picture of the mailbox.

   hmmmph….

2. Then, as soon as you get it finished, a car load of teenagers with a baseball bat cruises by and you have to start all over again. (I’m sure you could negotiate something with your UPS driver.)

3. The ground is unfrozen?

4. Those “This Old House” guys are liars!

5. After I’d put up mine, and I was proud of it, my mom makes a comment about how I need to replace that old ratty mailbox. AUGH.

6. Same thing is true for assembling a new BBQ pit.

   On the bright side, though, the inauguration of a new BBQ grill is truly one of the finest pleasures known to humankind, so that compensates to a significant degree for the skinned knuckles and sore backs.

   Hope your new mailbox brings you nothing but happy news, many wonderful ARCs, and whopping great royalty checks

7. Was the old one murdered by a snowplow? Leading cause of mailbox death following The Winter That Would Not End.

8. Depends on the mailbox. You can build a bombproof one to designed to survive the cars full of kids wielding bats around Halloween, or you can build one designed to be disposable and easiy replaced.

   I went for the bulletproof. Bought a “rubber” one with a picture of a Cat D-9 driving ove it on the cardboard box it came in, mounted it on a 4X4 concreted it well below the frostline, and put some large-diameter steel rod a foot or so on either side also firmly concreted into the ground to defeat the pranksters. It lasted for over 15 years, and was still going strong when I moved.

   I felt really sorry for one of my neighbors who obviously had moved out to the country for the first time when I saw him proudly installing a fany cedar mailbox that I’d seen in the local big-box store for over $100. Sure enough, a couple of days later he had a nice pile of cedar kindling fire-starter.

9. qmail or postfix?

10. After our third one was destroyed by teens with baseball bats (along with half the others on the block), my neighbor and I went in together and got large, monolithic, brick & mortar pillars (very nice looking) with mailboxes embedded in them. Never had a problem since. And they’re a great place to stand to be able to see over the neighbor’s houses at the approaching wildfires!

11. EVERYTHING is harder than you think. Oh, sure, it looks all simple and easy on the outside, but that’s because the manufacturers work hard to make it *LOOK* that way.

    Then! You pull the cover away, or pull the thing out of the box, or whatever – and you’re faced with the hailstorm of Tab A and Corkscrew L and Mismatched-and-Badly-Cut-Slot Q2X that takes the rest of the week to slog through.

    My condolences, sir.

12. Yep. When I installed mine, I couldn’t believe how many trips I had to make back to my house to get yet another tool I didn’t foresee needing.

13. This is not what I needed to know. We are looking at replacing ours, post and all, before the packing tape holding the whole thing together fails.

    Kids with baseball bats? My folks’ neighborhood used to get kids with explosives. There are a lot of brick mailbox housings there.

14. When planning any home improvement project, include in your schedule two otherwise unexpected trips to the local hardware store.

    If it’s a plumbing project, include three.

15. Athena said it was a sweet mailbox. Pics or gtfo ;-)

16. Yep, looking forward to that picture…(How many trips to the hardware store did this require?)

17. One of those tasks that are JUUUUuuuuuusssssttttt infrequent enough to disremember all the steps that would make it easy.

    Would a mailbox on one of those pivoting “gladiator training” things discourage the teenagers, or just attract lawyers?

18. Especially if it is a POP on 8.1.

19. There’s a new mailbox in my near future. Any tips?

    (Note: my mailbox is attached to the side of my house, not stuck on a post.)