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NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR TRUCK ON FIRE–

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THIS WEEKS FARM UPDATE FROM XDFBEN

Kelly commented one day she didn’t know why the handle on the drawer holding the kitchen garbage can always had streaks of something on it. I knew immediately it was probably from the egg I crack every morning, but I didn’t offer that up at the time. She might read it here…

I was making daughters egg cup the other morning. The first egg cracked perfectly, opened perfectly, and I plopped the yoke right into the cup. Went to crack the second egg and the shell pretty much disintegrated, the contents splashed onto the counter and slid right off into the garbage. (Over that handle of course). At which point, as I flailed, I knocked the egg cup with the first egg onto the floor. The dogs were right there for clean up. With luck, Kelly won’t know about that either. Course it was kinda funny so I’ll probably tell her. … at some point…

A few weeks ago, I saw a postal truck dead on the side of the road. The next day I saw it being towed. A few days after that I saw another one being towed. Jeepers. Then there was the semi carrying mail that caught fire on Hwy 52 outside Rochester. I do have to say, mail service to our house seems to be getting better. We’re getting mail before noon, whereas it had been 7PM for a few years. And often now, they’ll bring the mail and a package right to the house. Those of you who’ve been to the farm know that’s not a light task; it’s a long drive out of the way to bring a parcel down to us.

And then just the other day I saw one of the new postal vehicles. 

Uh… it’s…. something! 

It’s called the ‘Next Generation Delivery Vehicle’. NGDV.

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I did some internet searching on them. Here are various headlines and descriptions:

-U.S. POSTAL SERVICE’S UGLY DUCK MAIL TRUCK

-U.S. POSTAL SERVICE’S EV TRUCKS ARE STILL FUNNY-LOOKING, NOW HARDER TO KILL OFF

-The Postal Service’s new delivery vehicles aren’t going to win a beauty contest. They’re tall and ungainly. The windshields are vast. Their hoods resemble a duck bill. Their bumpers are enormous.

– The Oshkosh Next Generation Delivery Vehicles might look like background traffic in a Pixar film

-You can tell that [the designers] didn’t have appearance in mind

-SO MUCH FOR LOOKING COOL WHILE YOU DELIVER THE MAIL*

-It looks like a robot Beluga whale—built by the East German government.*

-Our Grumman mail trucks [The old trucks] look like they were supplied by the government of East Germany and they sound like the tortured exhalations of a hungover water buffalo—hhhhggggggggmmmmmggghhhh. Honey, the mail’s here.*

                *https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a35617691/the-new-usps-trucks-so-much-for-looking-cool-while-you-deliver-the-mail/

-Odd appearance aside, the first handful of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles … are getting rave reviews from letter carriers

– The side cargo door allows for direct delivery onto the curb

The drivers really like them. They have AC (Can you believe the old ones didn’t?), airbags, back up camera’s, a 360° camera, collision warning, and most importantly, the tall box allows drivers to walk through without ducking. The current vehicles, made by Grumman, came into service in 1987 and was scheduled for 25 years. They outlived that predicted life. But they are failing. And they seem to catch fire fairly often. Prior to that vehicle was the Jeep DJ-5. The USPS used them during the 1970’s and ‘80’s. I bought a used one from my friend Thom, and he had bought it used from someone else. It was dark green. I drove it for a few years in the mid 1980’s. It was standard left side drive, and I used it when I was a field reporter for the Department of Agriculture. With the sliding door, it was great for holding a measuring wheel out the door and driving around a field. It was just 2-wheel drive, so that wasn’t an option for every field, but it was still kinda cool looking (well, ‘Different’ anyway). Even with the bungee strap holding the back door shut (because if you went over a bump, the back door would pop open) and the steering was so loose you didn’t dare drive over about 55 MPH, but it was fun to drive. Thom had mounted a stereo between the seats, and bolted speakers to the back wall. The metal dash was pretty rudimentary.  

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Not my jeep, just a representative photo. I wonder why I never took a picture of mine?

Not too much happening around the farm. I did get the 630 carburetor back on and had it running! It’s quiet enough I could actually hear myself think! It’s not done, I have a few more things to replace. Saving up for the next ‘Old Tractor Part’s Order’.

I got a township call from a sheriff deputy about some junk that had been dumped. Turned out to be two large commercial pizza ovens. Those things are heavy! I called a couple neighbors to help load them. It was all we could do to just tip it up and tip it onto the trailer.

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Pizza ovens on the trailer

The next day was a sectional couch and mattress to pick up. Just more ditch clean up. Part of the job for a township supervisor. The couch and mattress I haul to county recycling. We know them on a first name basis there. We’re regulars. The pizza ovens I added to my scrap metal trailer.

I finally hauled in the old tires I had cut off those wagons. Took them to a local auto shop and paid ___ for disposal.

Got half an inch of rain Thursday night. More predicted.

Here’s a picture of a chicken because the green shades look so pretty.

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From a distance, they look black. But they have more colors than you’d think, and they are really pretty.

My summer Padawan has been out working on his car a few times. I helped him for an hour one night and rolling around underneath looking up, down, left, and right acerbated some vertigo I was beginning to get. The next day I sat very still. He’s learning a lot—I hope. He’s certainly at a disadvantage because he’s being self-taught, which is good, but it can be frustrating and it all takes longer. And he’s not quite in the right mindset for that. He’s eighteen so he knows everything already. And he gets frustrated easily with the car. I tried to tell him it’s all part of the job and if he’s gonna get frustrated, he’s in the wrong job. Monday he starts as an employee at a REAL job. A 7AM to 3PM job. We’ll see how that goes. Cross your fingers for him. I give him about a 35% chance of sticking with it. He just has no idea. And it’s going to take a few tries, and I suspect he’s gonna be one of those kids who must hit bottom to figure it out.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT ANY OF THIS?

WHATS THE UGLIEST VEHICLE YOU’VE SEEN?

49 thoughts on “NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR TRUCK ON FIRE–”

  1. My first thought was why are we spending what is probably an ungodly amount of money on new postal trucks when they just went through and removed all those mail boxes to save money. I suppose if the trucks are getting old and failing and the mail carriers really like the new trucks better, especially that being able to stand up part (which I never thought of before), then we should go for it. But they certainly are funny looking.

    I’m not a big automotive person so I can’t really think of any ugly vehicles that I’ve seen in my lifetime. The one that comes to mind right now of course is the cyber truck, which is just the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Sorry if you like them, just my opinion.

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    1. Cybertrucks are comic book interpretations of “cool.” I saw an orange cybertruck the other day. Whenever I see one, my reaction is, “There goes a mental twelve-year-old with, unaccountably, way too much money for his (it’s always a guy, isn’t it?) own good.”

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      1. …alternatively, he isn’t wealthy but he’s living in his parent’s basement rent free and using all his income to make payments on his cartoon car because that’s what counts.

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    2. At one of my advertising agency jobs, one of my clients was FiberFab, a company that made (and apparently still makes) kit cars. What that entailed was a “cool” fiberglass body—an open top roadster or some sort of low sleek pointy thing with a name like Valkyrie—that would be assembled on a Volkswagen chassis. So what you would end up with would be this poseur of a car that would sound like and have the power of a VW bug.

      The kits were not cheap, were a fair amount of work to build and the end result would be pure pretense. I always wondered who their market was.

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  2. I wonder about Padawan and his new real job. And I’m thinking back to when I was 18. Really does any 18-year-old have any clue what 9 to 5 real job is like? I certainly didn’t.

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    1. I’m surprised Padawan has gotten to 18 without having a real job. I had had a couple by then, not necessarily full time but with the same demands as a full-time job.

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      1. I assume it happens now because it happened to me. My dad really discouraged me from working in high school to the point where I never had a job in high school. He didn’t want it to get in the way of my academics. It’s interesting because my parents didn’t discourage my middle sister Sally. She worked too long summers at Six Flags… or as we called it… Sux Flags.

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    2. thats when i started selling
      one of my motivational tapes had a line that said you just start by selling the first guy after the rock. if he looked at you funny you just tell him and after it comes down you talk to the first guy after the rock. thats really what sales was… think sbout selling stuff then do it.

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  4. In the 60s fiberglass bodies were cast in Two Harbors for small mail delivery vehicles. They proved to be dangerous for mail carriers. They tipped and blew over easily. Nice piece of not field testing there. The company walked away leaving many of the fiberglass shells behind. You could have as you wanted. For years you would see them in rural backyards. I assume they all eventually deteriorated in the sun and rain and snow. Not quite sure what people used them for.
    I look at those new trucks and think they look top heavy, likely to blow over in a high wind.

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  5. Ben, our mail route is short in distance, long in time. It includes the mall and several apartment buildings. Sometimes we are first and get mail at 10 or so. Sometimes we are last and get mail anytime between 3 and 7. Sometimes packages are delivered separately and sometimes with the letterbox mail. Sometimes with both. There can be as many as 20 packages out in the lobby on any given day, many from Amazon. We long term residents suspects some days the letter box mail is not delivered.

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  6. A relatively new development is that we have been getting neighbors’ mail and they ours so that we have to correct the delivery. Our address is plainly marked, so that’s not the problem. The carrier must not even be looking at the address. Something about how the mail is sorted must be going on. I suspect it may be when we don’t have any mail on a particular day. The carrier then grabs the next group of letters (our neighbor’s) and drops those into our box and continues that out-of-sequence delivery until he or she notices the error.

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    2. For awhile my son Nate lived in south Minneapolis, and the other Nate of the same last name, with whom his life used to be entangled here and on the west coast, had the same street number but one street apart, but with different apartment numbers. It was surprising how seldom mail did get to the wrong Nate. Their email gets entangled more often.
      (Sandra is sleeping very hard this morning).

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  7. Rise and Pick Up Your Mail, Baboons,

    Those CyberTrucks are about the ugliest car/truck I have ever seen. Yesterday I saw one in which the truck bed was uncovered and full of lumber, the first time I have seen one used as an actual truck. Recently our mail delivery truck was different. The standard one must have broken down, but the replacement was not what the picture above looked like. It was very quiet which is quite different than the sounds of the old ones which are recognizable throughout the neighborhood.

    Today we attend a seminar on Parkinson’s Disease in Brooklyn Park so I will be back later.

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  8. My dad and his brother were the rural route carriers for our small town for many years. There were no mail trucks back then – they used their family sedans. I know dad would sit in the middle of the bench seat, drive with his left foot and hand, and reach out the passenger window to deliver the mail. In the latter part of his career, he switched to a small Jeep (don’t remember the model but it had a terrible suspension) and then a Chevy Blazer. Many of his rural customers were farmers. If he got stuck or ended up in a ditch due to bad roads, there was always a farmer with a tractor to pull him out. Years of all that twisting and bending left him with a bad back and nasty sciatica.

    Dad and his brother were both extremely punctual. Recently the brother of one of my high school classmates related the story that he and his many siblings got kind of bored in the summer – they lived in the country but not on a farm – so in the summer they would line up by the mailbox to wave at dad when he delivered their mail. They knew to the minute when he would be arriving.

    The cyber truck has no rival when it comes to ugly.

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    1. I really wanted a Jeep when I was in high school. Unfortunately even the high allowance of $5 that I got (for the time) wasn’t going to make that possible!

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      1. I test drove a jeep back in the 80s, probably a CJ 5 or 7, but it had a V8 engine and big tires and I knew it would just get me in trouble. It had a short turning radius and too much power and I’d have flipped it on its roof or got myself killed.

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  10. Love the photo up top…

    I wonder about the two pizza ovens left in the ditch for the county to pick up! Wouldn’t it be sort of easy to find out which pizza place those came from?

    I’m glad that at least the mail carriers approve of these new trucks. We’ll get used to seeing them, but they are sort of arresting at first glance.

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  11. Addendum to my earlier post. Mail delivery to our house was great. My town was small enough that we didn’t have house numbers or street names. People in town had boxes in the Post Office. We didn’t have a box number because dad would just bring our mail home with him. My friends thought it was really funny that they could send me a letter with just the town & state name (and later a zip code) and I would receive it. When buying something via the mail and a box number was required for mailing, we would just make up a number.

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    1. In the 30’s my uncle Arlo ordered something to be delivered to Arlo, Washboard Avenue, Sebeka, Minn. No box number. And that was not the name of their road. He was a town character. Not a lot of Arlos around. And their dirt road was famously very rough. The post office got a kick out of it and delivered it.

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  12. When I was a child if you got a large package, you got a card in the mailbox to come pick it up. That post office said more about government officialdom than any other place. Fancy scrolled wrought iron, all those ornate little boxes, all that mahogany. It was exciting when I was 3-5 years old.
    Our mailbox was a mile from our house. We were at the end of a road up over and down a steep hill, slippery in the winter. The post office would do the drive, which was fine with my father. We kids often brought home the mail because we were dropped off right by the mailbox.

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  13. i like the looks of the tesla truck
    really a lot
    when i was driving 500 miles a day it would pay for itself in gas savings.
    my house is where the mail guys park for a couple hours so they dony get back too soon. i cant imagine theyll be able to get away with that with technology sneaking in.
    a friend of mine who was a department head st a couple colleges said they looked for boomers because the work ethic just didnt exist elsewhere, i wonder about my kid who is hoping to land a job 2 years into his jobsearch as i get up and deliver instacart everyday. i couldnt fo it but he obviously is ok

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  16. I agree with the ugliness of the cyber truck. I didn’t know what it was called, but I’ve seen enough of them to recognize what you were all talking about. They look really flimsy, as if they’re made of tin foil.

    Sometimes it takes a while for a young person to learn a work ethic. I feel really proud of my nephew. He pretty much coasted through high school, playing video games and hanging around with his buddies. My brother was becoming impatient with him when he was a junior in high because he’d saved a lot of money for nephew’s education and nephew didn’t seem very interested in going to college. Suddenly one day nephew said to my brother, “Dad, I’ve applied and been accepted at Alexandria Technical College for the welding program.” Just out of the blue! My brother was floored – and delighted! My nephew got a welding certificate and is now earning quite a lot of money. He still hangs with his buddies. They’re going to move in together in the spring and learn about bill paying, tax paying, home maintenance, working together, and everything else that goes with it. Nephew decided on his own, he enjoys what he’s doing, he’s earning good money, and his auntie couldn’t be more proud of him!

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  17. I completely agree the cyber truck is the ugliest thing ever. I also thought there must be some other models that would have registered as ugly. Remember the VW “Thing”? Talk about being desinged by the East German Government.

    And I always thought the Nissan Cube was ugly. I knew a guy that had one and he loved it for hauling stuff; he said it was great for that.

    The AMC Pacer ranks up there. The LeCar. There must have been some models from the 1950’s that lacked panache.

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