Death of a mailbox

Last Thursday night, well technically Friday morning, I awoke at 3am to a loud crashing noise. I was only 1/2 awake and wasn't really sure what I heard. My first thought was someone was smashing pumpkins on the street in front of our house. I was a little alarmed by this thought because a couple of years ago someone smashed a pumpkin on the side of my son's car that was parked on the street. I feared that some prankster had done that again. But the fear wasn't great enough to cause me to get up and look.

As I started to drift back to sleep I heard the water softner running. Sometimes it makes some really strange noises. I thought perhaps since I was only slightly aware of what was going on that that must have been it, so I just wrote the noise off as coming from the water softner and fell back to sleep.

About 30 minutes later I woke up again because nature was calling. After taking care of business in the bathroom I decided to stagger only 1/2 awake to the window and look out to ensure that I didnt really hear something outside earlier. Just as I had suspected there was nothing out there and it must have been the water softner that I'd heard. I crawled back under the warm blankets and was out like a light.
Unfortunately I get up between 4:30 and 5 am so I my slumber was short lived and I was up and getting ready for work.

Friday morning is trash pick up day at our house but we always put the trash can out front on Thursday night. The kitchen trash can was pretty full so on my way out I decided to take the bag of trash in the kitchen out to the trash can. When I got out to the trash can, there it was the answer to the noise I'd heard at 3am in the morning. Our mailbox was laying on the ground with the side bashed in.

I figured someone must have ran into it and drove away. I picked it up and jury-rigged so that it could be used on the cracked plastic post and came in to tell Lori what had happened.

On my drive to work it occurred to me that the mailbox couldn't have been hit by a car because the trash can would have been hit as well. Someone had to have intentionally smashed or hit it with something, perhaps a baseball bat. But who would want to destroy our mailbox? Who had a vendetta out for us?

Of course our home owners insurance didn't cover such malicious destruction. Why would they, we only give them some astronomical amount every year to keep our home insured. So off to Menards we went this past weekend to purchase a new post and mailbox. It's amazing how expensive or inexpensive a mail box can be. You can spend $5 or $90 on a a mailbox. Well, you can bet that I didn't buy the $90 box.

Well after carrying the new mailbox and post around in my trunk for two days now I decided to get it out and put it together. Handy man I am not, hence me "driving miss mailbox" around for 2 days, trying to avoid having to deal with it.

Well, I got as far as getting our name and house number put on the mailbox. Tomorrow my goal is to actually attach the box to the the post and yes, even get it put into place at the curb.

I guess I'll just never understand what thrill there is in destroying someone else's property. Is there really so little to entertain these days?