Sadly it is only temporary. Continued from a previous post…

The mailbox I have it a hollow plastic post attached to a piece of steel angle iron driven into the ground. Usually, this time of year, I just have to remove the plastic post and re-drive the angle iron. Packing the area with stone is alway helpful. The freeze and thaw cycles, plus the push from the snow plows just seem to loosen up the area and the mailbox. Always a spring chore, but usually one that doesn’t take too long.

Not this year. The angle iron was bent at about a 40 degree angle. The plastic post was split 1/4 of the way up. So I had to get a new post. I bought the same kind, so that I could keep my current mailbox. And then I found out the bad news. The angle iron was replaced with a wooden stake. The bolt used to attach it was replace with 4 wood screws. The tools needed list on the outside of the box did not include the drill needed to start the holes for the wood screws or the necessity of both phillips and flat head screw drivers. Hmmm. I have other things to do today, so some of this would have to wait.

I drove the wooden stake in the ground (note self— get a bigger post) and then I attached the old post and mail box with a couple of the wood screws. I’ll be back out there the next nice day to drive in a new wood post (treated lumber maybe) and the new mailbox holding plastic post.

Didn’t I just have a discussion with friends on buying things that didn’t contain the proper tool list? Oh well it should hold up through Monday’s mail.

As I write this I am trying out three different weather gadgets on my desktop sidebar to see which one I will keep.  Right now Accuweather says 74° (okay, I just right-clicked and selected options to see which one it was and it updated itself), MSN says 76° (jumped to 79° after I checked its options!), and the Weather Channel was at 79° and just hopped up to 81°.  Well it seems that the Weather Channel one gets points for changing on its own, but which one is right? If I could just find the answer to that I would know which one to keep.  The Weather Channel one, by the way, also loses points for having its logo blatantly on the gadget while the other two conserve space a little better, but then again it has more options.  Sigh.  Until these three, I had used WeatherBug, which not only let me choose the location but also what thermometer I wanted to use in the area from a list of 8-10.  Unfortunately for some reason, after restarting the computer it would no longer connect to wherever it got its info from.  And reading the comments it would seem that I wasn’t the only one with this problem.  So here I am looking for a working gadget.  Well, if I don’t like these three there are always more on the gadget website- seems weather gadgets are a dime a dozen.

This Vista sidebar is pretty nice.  At first it had a little slideshow viewer, a clock, and an RSS headline reader (100 headlines, four at a time, and only the first few words of each one?  No thanks!) in addition to its own weather gadget (similar to the MSN one, but less frills).  I replaced the weather gadget, left the clock gadget- a pretty realistic looking analog clock by the way, and removed the other two.  I also downloaded a CPU/RAM meter and a wireless networking meter, the latter of which is waiting on the bench for me to get a wireless router.  There are also stock tools, search tools, and a lot more for the sidebar.  There are even some mini-games that can be installed.

Well, looking at the weather gadgets again, the accuweather was three degrees below the next higher one, but once again I had to manually update it so this one is probably gone.  However, the other two are at a three degree difference themselves- so which is right??  Sigh.

Well, if I happened to waste your time with this post I just have this to say- sorry, no refunds! 😛