The mailbox situation on my street is interesting.

It is an older street - most of the houses date from the 40s, a few are older than that (there are a couple, further down, that date from the early days of the last century - very likely before we were even officially a state). Some of the houses still have mail slots - in fact, most of the houses on the west side (across the street from me) have that; the postman parks and walks for those houses.

My house used to have a mail slot at some point. I know because I found the backside of it in my coat closet. (I don't really have a hall, just a tiny entryway with a coat closet off it). Apparently when the previous owner had the place re-sided, she just had them cover over the outdoor opening of the thing. (As well as cover over the contacts for a hard-wired doorbell; I kind of wish she hadn't done that, those "IR" doorbells only work for a little while).

Apparently, if you are a long-time resident (or have a disability exemption) you can petition to have door-delivery; otherwise, you need a mailbox. I don't THINK I've ever had anything stolen out of mine; the usual things you'd worry about (checks and such) always make it to me. Then again, I live in a quiet neighborhood and have neighbors that, if they saw a strange person removing mail from my box, would probably report them.

I will say if this one gets vandalized, I'm looking into one of the brick set-ups. I know some neighborhoods disallow them on the grounds that they can cause a lot of damage if someone hits them with their car (to which I would respond: if it's a deliberate hit, serves the person right).

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I guess the disgraced former governor of my former home state is in the news again. I caught the tail end of a radio report yesterday that he (Blagojevich) had claimed himself to be "Blacker than Obama" because of the neighborhood in which he grew up.

Two thoughts:

a. What a knucklehead. That is the most polite word I can think of to describe the guy's actions. It's one thing to THINK something, it's totally another to SAY it.

b. I grew up on a street that had a large country club at the far end of it. By Rod's logic, I should suggest people call me Muffy or Bunny. Ugh.

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One thing I did this weekend was to take down all the Christmas decorations. I can't, however, go totally cold-turkey about decorating after having all the stuff up. So I did my usual January mantel set up - left up the snowmen from Christmas, and then pulled out all my pressed-glass dishes to hold candles.

If you will indulge me:





I really love candles. Particularly in clear glass holders. (The big candles with 'sticks' on them were a Christmas present; they have cinnamon sticks embedded in the wax and a note with the candles said if you burned them for the right amount of time, by the time the centers had burned down, there'd be a space where a tealight could go, so you could continue to use the "shell")



These little tealight holders (I think they came from either Signals or Wireless, a number of years back) remain one of my favorite things ever.