It’s time for three random bits of minutae from The Nest’s week that was, as we strive to provide you with some light reading that will hopefully prove insightful and entertaining. I’m sure we’ll fail in that mission, but anyway…..
As I peeked my head out the door to check the mailbox Friday, I was a bit surprised to see a large FedEx envelope poking out of it. I wasn’t expecting anything… the only crap ever delivered to The Nest is bills and junk mail. As I flipped it over, I immediately caught the unfamiliar name on the address label and saw it was supposed to be delivered next door. Then I checked the rest of the mail, and it was ALL for my neighbor! What in the name of Cliff Clavin is going on here?
Maybe you should cut back on that beer, dude.
I’ve seen a lot of unfamiliar faces delivering the mail in my hood lately, and this isn’t even the first big mistake I’ve noticed recently. A couple months ago, I spotted a piece of trash in my yard that turned out to be a letter that was left to be picked up by a neighbor who lived one street down from me! The mail carrier picked it up and then dropped the thing in my yard!!! I put it back in my box to be picked up again, but who knows if it ever got where it needed to go. And if this sounds like a rant against the US Postal Service…. late last year, FedEx left a package at my door for the neighbor that I didn’t notice until I was leaving for work that night…
We need someone who’s an expert at delivering the goods!
If you like completely random bits of trivia, lists, and interesting collections of anecdotes… I highly recommend getting yourself one of Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers. They’ve been printing them annually for over 30 years now, and I’ve gone through about ten of them.
Yes, we can read books without pictures here at The Nest!
The 42 minutes I have to wait for my laundry to dry every Thursday morning is always killed knocking out about 30 more pages. Here’s one tidbit I read this week that caught my interest…
Veteran Hong Kong actor Law Lok-lam had an unusual run of bad luck when he set what could be a record by dying in five different soap operas in a 24-hour period last week [April 2011].
His character met a bloody end during a fight in the martial arts drama Grace Under Fire and he vomited blood before dying in Fate to Fate, the Sunday Morning Post reported.
In Relic of an Emissary, Law played the Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang who died after an illness.
In two other shows, Police Station No. 7 and comedy Virtues of Harmony the actor did not die on screen but his death was discussed, the paper said.
The man, the myth, the cadaver.
That instantly made me wonder if Buster had topped that before on my blog. Not counting compilations of Buster deaths, there was only one real shot… and that was my most recent SCT episode “Undercover Angel,” where Buster dies, and keeps returning back to the shelf to die again. It turns out Buster matches Mr. Lok-lam’s feat by being killed five times in that story…
It could be six if it’s possible to die by a Big Scrat attack…
Something to aim for in my next SCT episode…
It didn’t take long to warm back up again. I guess it’s meteorological summer after all…
Do you have to be a fan hog?
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
All the couriers here have started taking “photo proof” of delivery, which means you get emailed a random picture of your porch with the package on it. Some of the drivers get quite creative with their angles and lighting, lol!
I’m pretty sure I’ve never had to give my email address for a delivery before… at least not counting stuff I bought online. My Mom orders crap all the time, and a lot of it still just gets chucked on the porch, sometimes newspaper delivery style! And that’s considering how many people have cams on their front doors now. They don’t care… they can earn more on unemployment now anyway! That’s the Amurrican way!
Yup…we went from Siberia to Hades in a snap too. Although I knew it would, I still wasn’t prepared for the shock of 93ºF after bundling up just 3 days earlier of 48ºF early morning bliss with drizzle. Ahhh, those were the days. Stay cool.
P.S. You can rant about the Post Office any time. While to an extent, I sympathize with carriers but their whole ‘could give a crap’ attitude about how, when and sometimes if the mail gets delivered is getting old that I’m over the sympathy thing these days. DeJoy has been anything but. His long term plan to privatize the P.O. is brilliant but quite devious. My goodness this country has fallen from grace. Third world countries do the mail far better than we do.
It’s the humidity that’s been real bad here, which is more typical of late summer… but we’ve got that first “summer forecast” of the year coming up where they just add a thundercloud over the sun and warn you we could get pop up storms anytime this week! The private sector is having as many issues as the government is at job quality these days (to say nothing of getting people off the cash cow unemployment’s been in this current environment and actually filling the countless open positions in every business now). Government employees may actually be as productive as private employees now!
There see to be all sorts of weak links in the supply chain. Add in the fact that the work force is definitely messed up and it’s a perfect storm. Thank you very little panDAMNic. 😬
Hope you survive the humidity. That’s the worst part of summer heat.
I’d say you are justified in getting a little steamed at that mail delivery “service”. It happens all over the country now I’d say because postal workers (allegedly) know they’re going to be out of a cushy job at some point because of down-sizing and other b.s. put forth by the U.S. Postal Service. And like so many employed folks (yourself excluded) these days, they just don’t give a f*ck about doing a good job. I mean, apparently today’s worker has the attitude of “Who cares if I get fired? I can get another job IF I want to work, but of course I can spend my days sitting on my ass and watching re-runs of “Police Station Number 7″ and getting paid more than I would at a job.” It’s horrifying, especially if someone is invested in getting that shipment of kumquats to Auntie Bea in a timely manner. And that kumquat sender has to mail the damn fruit there. Fred-X and (Y)UPS aren’t much better in my opinion.
I’m surprised anyone’s still working with what unemployment’s paying right now. As Yakov Smirnoff used to say, “What a country!”
It’s always such a disappointment when something exciting-looking comes through the door and it’s a letter for someone else.
There were about a hundred people who lived in this house before me, and I still occasionally get mail for them. One I had to open was from a life insurance company, informing me that one of the previous occupants died (ten years prior!), and I just needed to submit a death certificate to claim his payout. Apparently the forgery I drew in Photoshop wasn’t good enough for them to send me the money…
We had a mail carrier some years ago who consistently gave at least PART of our mail to a neighbor two doors down. Said neighbor (who thankfully has moved since) apparently had a habit of not looking at the mail they took out of the mailbox – just tossed it in a big basket. Hubby went next door to see if THEY got a bill we had been expecting and they hadn’t (she said they would have brought it to us if they’d gotten it) then went to the GUILTY neighbor who said “I don’t know if I got it – I hardly ever look at the mail” and rummaged around in the pile of crap in the “mail basket” and there was our bill. “DUH….stupid mail carrier huh”……to which David agreed since the guy was about 100 lbs. bigger/heavier/scarier than David. We always check our mail for wrong deliveries – happens all the danged time. Poor Buster – I do think he needs to catch up to that Chinese actor – or maybe surpass him by a few stabbings/shootings/road accidents. Buster is a STAR.
Pam
Buster’s not about to take that guy’s record lying down. In fact, he’s volunteered to go teach your mail thief a lesson right now!
We live on cul-de-sac that has seven houses and a vacant lot. Our mailboxes are out on the main street by the entrance to the cul-de-sac. The boxes are clearly marked with the house number in big numbers. We get mail from all over, destined addressed to 18th street when we live on 16th street and we’re constantly getting each other’s mail on 16th street. We don’t want anyone else’s bills.
A 6 and an 8 are close enough for government work, as they say…