Dream: The basketball tournament

As part of a basketball tournament my younger niece was participating in, I found a display at my Aunt D's house. Most of the coaches had provided their players' photos and statistics on boards, but my brother had sent a large box of disintegrating old books and a small box of photos that had been ruined when someone colored out whole areas with a crayon.

Some of the photos were of a beach vacation at a place where the summer light lasted all night, and I kept thinking of Niagara Falls. The photos made me long to be at that half-lit, surreal beach again, which I thought I remembered but didn't.

When I looked again in one hallway, all the displays were gone. The next hallway was also empty. I was going to call my parents to pick me up, but had put my mobile phone aside.

Toward the back of the otherwise empty house, I found some women waiting for an elevator. One of them told me my aunt's house was huge, even after she'd closed off much of it. This part was used for this elevator, which transported these women undergrounds so they could get to their organization in the farmhouse across the field. All of this intrigued me, but I wished I had my phone so I could leave.

Somehow I found myself carrying a bucket of ice for this organization across the field. Instead of delivering it, however, I dumped it out into one of the field's rows, where it mixed instantly with the dirt to become mud.

I continued to dream about the land where the sun never sets and my aunt's limitless house.

Dream: Date with a vampire

A vampire had threatened to get me, only I didn't know how. Soon I recognized him near me in different guises, first as a child, then as an elderly woman who changed into a beautiful young woman. I wasn't afraid to use my strength even against such incongruous characters, but each succeeded in biting me, usually in the arm, but not enough to break the skin. I felt strong but also like he might be toying with me.

I'd gotten into an elevator with a cousin who was sitting in a folding chair. The elevator started to go down with him, but my feet weren't touching the floor. I panicked, although at times my feet did touch. The elevator stopped between floors, with the chair now folded up against the door and me suspended, yet not suspended. It was nighttime, and I began to fear that we would never be found.

Relics: Turning the TV antenna

If you remember TV antennas, read about my experience with them here.

Wapiti in Pennsylvania

Merry Christmas 2011

How to meet an introvert

If you're an introvert like me, take Sophia Dembling's quickie survey on how introverts like to make connections. Go directly to the survey here.

Relics: Mail chute

A couple of years ago in "Please Mr. Postman," I marked the prolonged passing of the blue mailbox, no longer needed in the age of text messaging, mobile phones, and social media. Before USPS started carting the Chicago boxes off to rust at the central office (where I saw what seemed to be thousands lined up, with nothing to do and nowhere to go), another type of mail collection method had fallen into disuse—the mail chute.

The first mail chute I saw and used was at 200 South Riverside Plaza in Chicago, at my first job. The chute ran down the wall across the hall from the word processing room on the 37th floor. People still used it then, in 1983. Walking past it, I would be startled by the sudden whoosh of an envelope falling down the chute, presumably on its way to a collection box. Sometimes, however, someone would ambitiously stuff, say, a 9" x 12" envelope into the chute, which had the same effect as some boxes do in trash chutes—it would "gum up the works," as my dad might have said.

I don't recall if the mail chute was still in use when the company relocated to 203 North LaSalle Street in 1986. A contemporary blend of glass, steel, and atrium. this building probably didn't have anything as quaint as a mail chute.

The Flamingo, which opened in the late 1920s, has a mail chute, although it's closed off on the floors. I have no idea where it may have ended, as it's west of the elevators, while the mail collection box in the lobby is on the north wall across from the elevators.

Cutler~Mail~Chute~Co.
Rochester, NY.
Cutler~Mailing~System
Authorized by P.O. Dept.
Installed under the Cutler Patents

Note that it's not just a mail chute and mail collection box, but a <em>mailing system</em>. Product pretentiousness isn't a contemporary invention.

Find out more about the history of the Cutler Mail Chute Co. and the mail chute system at the National Postal Museum site and, of course, Wikipedia.