It’s snowing today, as it did on Friday. Apparently, we’re going to have an early and persistent winter. Well. Our very first winter in Maine, when we were living in Skowhegan, it snowed every night — sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, every day — and I just figured that it always snowed in the winter, in Maine. In the years between, we’ve had some winters where we got very little snow, but a lot of cold, a couple of warm winters, a recent winter that dropped ten feet of snow over the course of the season, averaging a few inches every couple days, and a biggish fall once a week. Very seasonal. Sigh.
Here at the new house, we can hide the car in the garage, and we have engaged a guy to plow the driveway on a temporary basis, to see if we’re both satisfied with the arrangement. The front steps are gong to have to be solved. I may need the War Engineer to come by and see if he can put a peak over the steps, so that we can at least open the front door from inside, during heavy snowfalls.
And! This Just In from the Maine Weather Service: Maine Expected to Get Another Snowstorm Before Thanksgiving.
Winter has also illuminated an unanticipated problem with city living. We are in a hybrid situation with regard to mail delivery. Which is to say, we do not have what I think of as a City Mailbox, that hangs on the house near the front door, nor do we have a mail slot in the front door.
What we have instead, is curb-side delivery, like we had out in the country. Which is fine, the curb’s not that far away, after all, except. . .
Mail is routinely delivered between 4 and 5 pm. It gets dark in the winter-time at 4:30ish. We live on a busy road, and while there is a streetlight across the street from our drive, there’s no sidewalk. Therefore, in order to approach the mailbox, in the winter, when there will be a pile of snow between our driveway and mailbox, we will have to walk out into the road, in the dark.
This seems. . .suboptimal.
So, we’re thinking about moving all of our mail delivery to the post office box, and switching the Informed Delivery Service to that address, so we know when we have to drive out.
I will say that I never considered mail delivery when I was thinking about the potential challenges of returning to city life after a quarter-century in the country.
In another aspect of City Living, I’m actually enjoying going to the gym. It changes your outlook, when the gym’s a five minute drive, instead of half-an-hour.
So that.
From the writing edge of life, Accepting the Lance is moving along; it’s going to be a long book, I fear, so y’all need to prepare yourselves for that.
I think that’s everything, except for this — a video that Steve and I made for you — yes, you! — to thank you for everything you do.
your patreon link to that short video gives me a 404 error message and a cute little animation of a Fox, floating in space while a ship orbits a small planet.
Isn’t that funny? The video comes right up for me. I’m bummed, too; I really wanted to see the fox in his spaceship…
Hi,
if the lance gets too long, maybe that should be two lances, then?
I would be glad about every extra book from you two, always.
Wolfram, Berlin, Germany
If where you live now counts as “in town”, could you chose to remove the curbside mailbox and instead put a mailbox near the front door?
It would be some more steps for the mailman, but if the rule for houses “in town” is that they can have mailboxes at the door, they should still deliver your mail even if they have to walk up the front door path to do so. Unless maybe you have such a long driveway/path to the house that the mailman can’t see the number and mailbox from the road?
You could ask at the postoffice, next time you go there, if that would be allowed.
Ooh, long book! I love long books when they are written by authors I really like to read.
It’s the class of street that dictates where the mailboxes go. On our street, which is very busy, with large lots, the mailpeople don’t walk across people’s lawns and deliver at the house; they drive jeeps, and deliver curb-side. If we were up on the hill, we’d have a mailbox on the front of the house, and the mailman would park his jeep at the corner and deliver the neighborhood mail on foot.
Would a solar light near the mail box work. We use post caps around our pool, and corner ones that just come on when someone walks near the house.