the coming week in mail (not that you care)

You may want to do a bit of review before reading further.

Ready? Okay.

So, Tina did a bang up job on route 3 the past two days. She had a lot of help, mostly from me (the quantity of help is not indicative of its quality, BTW). My eyes are still a little buggy from all the mail I had to case on Friday and Saturday.

The latest wrinkle is that the carrier on route 4, as expected, has called out indefinitely which puts Ann on that route for pretty much the rest of the century. The upshot is that Tina will have to learn yet another new route this week. She’ll have to learn route 7, which is my primary route. This frees me up to do route 5 (the monster).

Thursday will present a pretty big challenge. That’s a day after a holiday and Tina will most likely be on R7 for the first time that day. I’ll probably have to case all the mail on 5 and a fair amount on 7 as well. I may even have to help Tina on the street, depending on how much time I have.

She’s a trooper though. She even had a smile on her face when I saw her yesterday afternoon. I think management ought to come up with some way to reward her for this. They won’t, but they should.

hand vs flowers

I don’t have any hibisquik… hibachi… of those flowers in my yard. I still wanted to play though, so….

 

I found some of these orange things…

 

 

and some of these magenta thingies…

 

 

and some of these white pedaly plants…

 

 

and this stuff…

 

 

one of these too…

 

 

 

 

and last but not least…

lost music

Update: Okay, people. See, the whole point of this exercise was to inspire you to post your own heavy rotation playlist, not to critique mine. That’s not to say that critiquing is bad, feel free. But while you’re at it, do what Eric did and tell us what you’re listening to. The world wants to know!

So hey, I burned a CD from my iTunes library a couple of weeks ago and have been listening to it quite a bit. Burning one’s own mix is so coomonplace it’s passe, but I hardly ever do this. I’m one of those fuddy duddies who still prefers listening to an entire disc by one artist. Most of the songs in my mix were downloaded from ITS but a couple can’t be found there so had to be flown in from other sources.

Because it demonstrates how odd my taste in music can be, here’s a track list…

Take Me to Your Leader	Newsboys
Trains Up In the Sky	Mylon & Broken Heart
Goody Two Shoes	Adam Ant
Free As A Bird	Beatles
Money For Nothing	Dire Straits
Karma Police	Radiohead
Real Love	Beatles
Dark Street	Fastball
How Soon Is Now	The Smiths
Walking On Sunshine	Katrina & the Waves
Turning Japanese	The Vapors
We Can Work It Out	Phil Keaggy & PFR
Getting Closer	Paul McCartney & Wings
Touch	Delirious?
Slip Slidin’ Away	Paul Simon
Let ‘Em In	Paul McCartney & Wings

Speaking of Katrina and the Waves: I’m quick to tell anyone that they were one of the best bands I ever saw live. Serious! They opened for Don Henley, who was quite good. But Katrina and the Waves provided the WOW! of that long, long ago evening at the Mann Music Center in Phila, PA. They all had wireless instruments (this was back when almost no one used them) except for the drummer. He came out first and started pounding a rhythm which had the crowd on its feet in seconds, then a guitar joined in but K and the Ws were nowhere in sight. Out they came in a sort of conga line with the guitar player in front and Katrina at the back. They paraded to the front of the stage and… kept on going, disappearing again behind the drummer. They made another lap and then proceeded to play a set of spectacularly great poppish rock and roll.

After they were done the crowd stomped their feet in rhythm and chanted “we want more” over and over. Sadly, warm up bands never do encores so K and the boys never came back out. Too bad.

When I bought “Walking on Sunshine” off of iTunes, I also looked for another great tune of theirs called “Spiderman.” It’s not there and I can’t find it elsewhere either. iTunes has just about every other song from Katrina and the Waves‘ discography, but not this one. Figures.

What’s in heavy rotation on your pod/notebook/changer?

classic party behavior*

My friends the Waters throw a huge 4th of July party every year. This year’s happened yesterday. I enjoy them very much because the Waters are ‘no pressure’ people. This fact is important because I am on off-the-scale introvert. I love parties, as long as I’m not forced to interact with a whole bunch of people, especially at once.

I had a great time at yesterday’s bash. Here’s what I did…

• I went by myself (my family went too but since I had church stuff to finish, they left without me).
• I got some food and sat at the only empty table. The table wasn’t actually empty, there were three people sitting at one end of it but they didn’t acknowledge my existence, which is fine by me. My wife sat with me.
• While chatting with my wife and enjoying the food (standard barbecue fare, but lots of it), I watched whole messes of people (there were probably 60 or 70 people in the Waters’ back yard) playing volleyball, playing UNO… the drinking game version, and riding around in the trailer on the back of a riding mower.
• My family left because my daughters were bored. After that, I sat for another hour and a half watching people do pretty much what they had been doing before and saying not a word to anyone.
• Eventually the hostess sat down to talk with me and a couple other people joined us and asked the usual questions about how things were going, was I still delivering mail, do I like that, etc. This conversation, which lasted about 30 minutes, filled my quote of social interaction for the day, and probably the week.
• I left. I drove to WaWa and got some coffee, then I went home.

A perfect evening.**

 

*When I say classic, I mean ‘classic’ only as it applies to me and perhaps to others who are similarly introverted. In other words, I’m not talking about normal people here.

**Except for the fact that Pottstown doesn’t have a Starbucks.