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Saturday, September 29, 2007

swings and roundabouts

grrrrrrr. I feel very frustrated with myself - I CRACKED and bought a new letterbox.
What a waste of money and resources. I am PERFECTLY capable of making one - but haven't gotten round to it - for years.

I ran over our letter box for the third time this week. Every time we take the lid off to get the mail out, it falls apart again., It has been resting on the ground for months since the naughty little street urchins down the road took great joy in knocking it over and smashing it last school holidays. Rather than get a new one straight away, as a little sign of defiance I just cobbled it back together and keep on using it - hoping that they felt embarrassed each day as they walked past.

It has been a carefully constructed pile of bits of wood with rocks holding up at the sides and a rock on top. The poor postie has to lean down , lift the rock off and put the letters inside without the whole thing tumbling down. Once I was coming back from a walk the same time as the posty was leaning down from his bike, trying to get the letters in - I was so embarrassed I had to keep walking past my house until he had done the street and I could double back.

Anyway, I have been keeping my eye out for an arty clever hand made one, but they are either too expensive or too boring. And every month that goes past I feel badder and badder about the poor posty. We got ANOTHER one of those post cards from Australia Post letting us know they were concerned about the security of our mail, and the compliance of our mail box. And then I backed over the whole thing again.

So Lacuna Sabbath afternoon was spent at Bunnings looking for the least conservative letterbox. Nothing elegant or frugal about this purchase -that's for sure.

BUT, on the up side, I have found a buyer for my clever home made chicken run. I am very proud of this run - I made it out of almost all recycled bits and pieces. It is fox proof and comfortable for the chickies in Summer and Winter. And on Monday it is to a new home in Hall with a lovely family who are looking for more comfortable digs for their 4 bantam hens. Yay! And they LOVE that it is hand made out of recycled stuff and thought it was very cleverly put together. (preen!) So I am hoping that somehow this makes up for the stupidness of my letterbox purchase.

Did you know one chicken house equals 1/2 a letterbox?

2 comments:

Sherd said...

Surely a clever recycled chicken house is worth more than 1/2 a letterbox?

Maybe even several letterboxes?

You know, if you look at the thing as a whole, all the part that were recovered from the waste stream etc...

For years we had our letterbox wedged in the crook of a big tree at the front of the house. As the tree grew bigger, the letterbox got more and more squished by the trunk on either side. And you had to grab the mail out of the box and immediately bash it against the side of the tree to dislodge any spiders that had snuggled in there. Eventually we cracked and got a new one and put it on a post next to the tree. It wasn't the same though...although that might not have been a bad thing. Less spiders, for one thing.

The Duck Herder said...

hello Sherdie! xxxxxxxx

I nkow what you mean about the spiders - our old letter box on the farm was a sort of delux condo for huntsman spiders - hairy, big, scary, screechy but mostly harmless!

xxxxxx