Tag: mailbox

Dead-Letter Danes

Denmark strikes me as a charming little country. It’s only half the size of South Carolina. The central town of Billund (pop. 7,300) is the birthplace of LEGO. The Little Mermaid – the famous waterfront bronze statue – honors the fairy tales of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. And the Viking warriors of Denmark’s past seem like cartoon characters compared to today’s warmongers. Now let’s add another reason to admire the Danes. By the end of 2025 their postal service will no longer deliver the mail.

Imagine walking out to your mailbox, dropping down the little door, and finding… nothing.  Do you really have to imagine it?  I can’t remember the last time my mailbox contained anything worth putting my hands on.  It’s a daily pity-party pile in there: postcard ads, clothing catalogs, and random solicitations addressed to “Resident”.  Christmas, birthday, and occasional thank-you cards are about the only personal touch we’re giving USPS anymore, and I speak as a baby boomer.  The younger generations click keys instead of lick stamps.

Denmark discovered the obvious.  Since Y2K their personal mail volume has dropped 90%.  It’s pretty much the same as removing eleven eggs from the box of twelve.  You used to deliver a dozen but now you deliver just one.  Denmark’s Postal Service has been around for over 400 years so understandably a few of its citizens – seniors in particular – are upset about the quit.  But are they really happy to pay 29 Danish krone (about $4.20) to mail a letter somewhere within their tiny country?  That cost would have me turning to email as well.

Let’s put a “stop” to this

Denmark is already beginning to remove its 1,500 public mailboxes, which got me to thinking.  What will the U.S. do with all of our own mailboxes when our time comes?  We have tons of the free-standing blue ones, where you pull open the door and drop in a letter.  By my (questionable) math, since Denmark is half the size of South Carolina, and South Carolina is only 1% of the U.S. geography, we could have over 300,000 of these dead-weights just taking up space.

And what about the mailbox in front of your house?  Remove it from its stand and then what? Oversized breadbox for the kitchen?  Storage for a stack of small tombstones?  Garage for Mini Cooper?  The odd shape of traditional mailboxes just makes you want to melt them down for scrap.

It’s time for the U.S. to get on board with mighty Denmark and stop delivering the mail.  UPS, FedEx, Amazon and a host of others now command package delivery.  Any bill worth paying can be settled online.  And for every twenty “circulars” my wife likes to leaf through, maybe one catches her eye with something she’d want to buy.

I can’t reconcile the fact that a letter to my niece way out in Hawaii or one to my neighbor right next door costs the same to mail: $0.73 for the first-class stamp.  Maybe it’s why USPS reported a loss of ten billion dollars in 2024 alone.  With that much red, the cost could be 29 krone (or $4.20, remember?) and it still wouldn’t make a profit.  If you ask me, removing that particular debt from the federal budget sounds as sweet as… well… a cinnamon Danish.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #8

(Read about the start of this “church service” in Highest Chair)

Christian hymns sometimes refer to “tearing down the walls”.  We were doing anything but tearing down at Notre-Dame de Paris today.  Bags 12, 13, and 14… of 34 bags of pieces, had us beginning to surround the nave (the main space) with walls of stone, glass, and columns galore.  The vertical construction progressed so quickly I swear I heard a parishioner cry, “Let us out!  Let us out!”

Check out all those columns in the first photo.  It’s like an army of soldiers took up residence in the cathedral, bracing themselves like Atlas for the weight of what is soon to be built above them.  It’s a wonder the congregation can move about in the sanctuary without banging into a soldier here or there.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven

Today’s math lesson: multiples of seven.  We built seven of this or fourteen of that, or in the case of those soldier columns, twenty-eight.  And you know those Lazy Susan spinners the cake decorators use for frosting and such?  I could’ve used one today since I built a little on the north wall, then switched to the south wall, then back to the north, and so on.

Cathedral doors forthcoming

It’s a good thing I’m showing you the sanctuary looking down from above (feeling divine?)  As you can see from the west end here – where the bell towers will soon rise – we’re already pretty well buttoned up.  Settle in, all ye faithful; get comfortable.  Those walls will continue to rise up around you.

Running build time: 6 hrs. 50 min.

Total leftover pieces: 26

Some content sourced from the BBC.com article, “Denmark postal service to stop delivering letters”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

eccentric

Our neighbor to the north is what is politely referred to as an eccentric.  He is that guy you probably see in your own neighborhood now and then: an older gent who tends to stay to himself, with a bizarre sense of fashion, and the uniquely long, wispy, wild gray hair that completes the picture of a silver-screen creeper.  I can’t help but stare every time I see him ambling about.

Our eccentric is home all the time but he’s not someone for the neighborhood watch.  You would know this just by looking at his property.  In addition to his adobe-style house – which looks like it was helicoptered in and dropped amidst the horse properties of the area – he has several outbuildings remaining from an old ranch that once commanded hundreds of acres.  Collectively the buildings made for a quaint Colorado postcard when you looked out my window.  Then creeper tore them all down, leaving only a large silo and an old wooden livestock loading ramp.

In the ten years we’ve lived here, we’ve only run into Mr. Crazy a handful of times.  Most of those encounters reinforced the idea that he’s missing a few marbles.  On one occasion, his cows escaped his property (run cows, run for your lives!) and he called my wife demanding she get on a horse and go after them.  On another occasion I called the fire department on him, because he started a huge blaze inside the silo burning God-knows-what. (Weed?  I don’t remember but maybe that’s because I got high).  On yet another occasion – in a doctor’s office of all places – psycho showed up minutes after we did to see the same doctor.  Stalker.  I was quietly hoping the doctor would check him into a round room and give him a bag of marshmallows to play with.  But alas, there he was back on his property the very next day.

Our latest encounter with loony – an experience that cements our neighbor’s status as out-to-lunch – involves our mailbox.  It’s an innocent-looking picture, isn’t it?  Boxes sitting quietly on a modest stand waiting patiently for their daily fill from USPS.  In fact, the boxes are sitting on a brand new stand in a brand new location.  They used to live on a stand further to the north – on screwball’s property.

11- mailboxes

Here’s the quick story.  In mid-December, just in time to boost my holiday cheer, I received a notice from dingbat.  The notice told me the stand underneath the mailboxes belonged to him, and he was taking it down because he decided to move his own mailbox to the other end of his property.  So for the rest of us – my other two neighbors and I – we needed to find a new stand and relocate our mailboxes.  Get er’ done in two weeks or the mailboxes would be left sitting on the ground.  Unless, madman was quick to add, we’d each kick in $50.  Then he’d leave the stand in place.  $50?  Heck, I can get a year’s worth of a P.O. box for less than that.

Anyway, I conferred with my neighbors and just for kicks we decided to… do nothing.  No response to our notices and no $50.  The ol’ wait and see.  Well, wacko didn’t disappoint.  Each of us received another notice just before New Year’s telling us “time was running out!”  Well Happy New Year, old man; we still didn’t do anything.

Okay, so here’s the one part of the story where bats-in-his-belfry gets a little pat on the back (not a real one, mind you).  The final notice we received – shortly after January 1 – was an official document from the USPS Postmaster telling us we had one week to relocate our boxes.  Needless to say, end of story and see photo above.

One final oddity about Mr. Crazy.  He hand-writes his notices in illegible #2 pencil scrawled on yellow pad.  Most people would create a Word document and print it, or write a single note and then copy it.   Weirdo wrote every one of his notices by hand.  Who does that?  What really goes on in that house over there?

If you’re concerned my lack-of-marbles neighbor will read this, I’ve probably made his day since he seems to enjoy pestering those who live nearby.  I can just picture him over their behind the curtains of his out-of-place adobe, reading my blog and doing a jig while he cackles and throws Cheetos at his computer.  Yeah, yeah – have your fun pal – we’re still not moving.  Just don’t ask me to borrow a cup of sugar.