I was just going to buy a length of PVC pipe, with an inside diameter just slightly bigger than the outside diameter of the wrecked pipe, and use it as a "splint" until I could find someone to dig a new posthole for a new mailbox, but then I saw this mailbox-post kit at Lowe's and decided to do it myself.
It has a large wooden stake (you can't see it because of the plastic sheathing but it's a good 2 1/2 feet long) that you drive into the ground, and then you screw the plastic sheathing on to it, and then you screw a wooden board onto that, and then attach the mailbox.
I am also now the owner of a big heavy rubber mallet. (I knew I had one over in the lab at school, but it was small, and it belongs to the university, and I didn't particularly want to drive over there and hunt for it...and, of course, someone could have "borrowed" it because I never followed through on my threat to paint it pink and put Hello Kitty stickers on it, so none of my male colleagues would feel comfortable taking it).
I will admit I felt rather Buffy the Vampire Slayer as I went out there, the hem of my greatcoat swirling about my ankles in the wind, stake in one hand, mallet in the other. (The illusion was destroyed somewhat after I realized that I had pounded the stake in in the wrong orientation - the wide end needed to face the street, not be perpendicular to it. But I was able to pull the stake back out and re-orient it, and drive it in again - deeper this time).
It's probably not "permanent," I suppose something will eventually eat the wooden post, but it will probably last for a few years.
I think I must have a gremlin or poltergeist that attacks mailboxes. The white mailbox on there is the fourth I've owned; one mailbox was destroyed when someone threw a pumpkin at it after Halloween one year, another was taken out by someone hitting it with the mirror of their pickup (one of the HFOB residents, back in the summer when I had the terrible renters next door. I will say the guy destroyed his mirror in the process). I also had one that someone tried to blow up with firecrackers. And now the pole that had withstood all that broke.
I suppose if I do have a house-gremlin, and it's only attacking the mailbox, I should be happy. There are a lot worse things a house-gremlin could do.
***
And let the cavalcade of finished objects begin.
The first thing I completed over break were the traffic-stoppin' boot socks:
This photo is dark but you can at least see the Swiss Dot stitch on it.
Here they are on:
It occurs to me that you lot have seen more pictures of my feet than you have of my face.
The socks are comfortable, while I doubt I could stop traffic in them (I tend to think you have to be Claudette Colbert circa 1934 for your pedal extremities - or, perhaps, your crural extremities, rather, to cause that to happen).
Pattern is here if you want to make your own. It's a pretty clear pattern and I think someone who was even a beginner at socks could manage it.
2 comments:
That looks like a rather pleasant old street. I like older neighborhoods.
There is a lot of mailbox vandalism in our area so people construct various, sometimes interesting, vandal-resistant mailboxes. Ours is made of two mailboxes of different sizes, the smaller one (with the door removed) placed inside the larger one, with concrete poured in the space between the two. It required two people to install and it needs a somewhat heftier post, or perhaps a pile of bricks. I keep thinking it's going to fall down one day but it's been there for several years and so far just leans a little bit.
This is one of those times when I'm grateful to live in a neighborhood so old the mailboxes are actually attached to the houses. (I don't have a mailbox, myself; instead, I have a slot cut into the garage door. Saves the postal carrier a couple of steps, and it gets the mail into a place where it's harder to steal.)
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