Father of Six

I went to the gym this morning. Another treadmill run of 40 minutes. A little slower today, and the machine I was on wasn’t registering properly. I set the speed for six mph, but it would only go to 5.2 mph. It was a good workout. I think I need a new battery for my heart rate monitor as this was the second time that my heart rate registered and 240 bpm. Not likely.

I got a set of the apparatus called “The Perfect Push-up” for christmas. I started the work out plan with them yesterday. I think I’m going to be sore.

It Snowed. Before everyone woke up, I had to shovel the porch, driveway and sidewalk.

The tree looked pretty.

The stockings were ready.

These three girls were ready.

As were these two.

Boomer started things off with the contents of his stocking.

Amanda had a place on the floor.

Nana and Becca had the love seat.

Nana liked her Alabama shirt.

Brit and Daner liked their Oklahoma albums.

Dubois like the wrapping paper, but I don’t think he liked have the elf hat on.

Mr. and Mrs. Claus together as he was talking with Eric on the Phone.

Howie, who is the unfortunate one with his birthday on Christmas came over. Merry Birthday Howie.

Later, we went to my Mom and Vern’s for dinner, where Tami and Jeanne always clean up. Mom is on the left supervising.

We went to the Lang’s for Christmas Eve dinner and gift exchange. It was a nice evening. Rick made chicken and dumplings. Here is a photo of the dumpling pot.

Here is Tami with a bow on her head.

Becca is pleased with the entire evening.

Rick is asking how everyone likes the C&D.

Amanda and Danielle are happy.

Brittany likes her lotion.

Since this holiday season is going to be a bit hectic, we decided to have our tradition dinner last night 12/23 instead of potentially cramming two full “turkey” meals into one day on the 25th.

Here are a few photos.

I went to the gym this morning where I did my 40 minute escalating run with the occasional minute walk period. I ran 3.55 mile during this workout, which is an 11:16 per mile pace.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) employs roughly 700,000 people who work to ensure that 213 billion pieces of mail are delivered to 146 million addresses each year.

So just how in the hell did this letter get delivered to my house?

As you can see when viewing the full image, Vivian Taylor of Columbus, Ohio addressed a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Ernie Deforge of Coniston, Ontario, Canada.

Lets see if we can track the letter and the number of people who handled it, each of whom made some form of mistake to allow this letter intended for delivery in Canada to eventually wind up being delivered to my home in suburban Denver, Colorado, USA.

Vivian then, we can only assume, placed the letter in her mailbox expecting a postal carrier (1) to come by and collect the letter from the box along with the rest of the mail, and take it to the post office. There, all of the mail is placed (2) on a truck and taken (3) to a mail processing plant.

At the mail processing plant, machines (4 – but not a person!?! a person must load the machine) separate mail by shape and size. They also orient the packages so their addresses are right-side up and facing the same direction. Your letter gets its postmark, and machines print cancellation lines across postage stamps to prevent them from being reused.

Lets check the letter again to see the post mark and cancellation lines across the postage lines.

Yep, the stamps are canceled.

Take a look at the top center of this image and you can see that the postmark is clearly made at Columbus, OH.

Now here is where the technology of the machine makes the first easily identifiable error. It works like this – an optical scanner scans the address, and then a bar code representing the specific address is sprayed on the front of the envelope. If the scanner can’t read the address, the letter is manually sorted.

Look closely at the image above and you can see the bar code and the digit sequence “80121-2309″ preceding the bar code. I have no idea what the bar code represents, but the numbers are my USA zip code. How did the machine scan the Ontario address and interpret it as my Colorado one? I like the statement about if the machine can’t read the address that it is manually sorted.

From there the letter then goes on to other machines. While still at the mail processing plant other processing machines (5, machine again) read the bar codes and direct the letters into bins based on ZIP codes — this indicates the next processing plant in the region where the letter will ultimately be delivered.

From the bins, the letters are sorted into trays by ZIP code (6) and flown or trucked (7) to the next processing. Revisiting the image of our letter again,

in the lower left you’ll see someone has written “Par Avion” and “Air Mail.” I don’t think it was our Vivian – compare the handwriting between these words and the delivery address. Perhaps this was a (8th) person to handle our letter? This is also our first indication that the letter has maybe made it into Canada, otherwise why the French “Par Avion”? Or maybe someone in the USPS system actually read the address, and knowing a journey to Canada required adherence to some nutty rule about the dual official languages and wrote the Air Mail version in French?

At the final processing plant (9,) sorting machines read the bar codes and sort the letters by carrier (10) and into delivery order for that carrier (11.)

The letters are taken to the individual post offices (12), and the carriers load the trays into their individual vehicles for final delivery (13.)

(All the information about how mail gets processed was extracted from this website – http://people.howstuffworks.com/usps5.htm)

By my unofficial guess, that’s 13 different people who had the opportunity to catch the mistaken digital zip code and bar code. Evidently, NONE of the 13 felt obligated.

The final question and issue I have is this. How can my postman, in good conscious, not recognize any portion of the faulty address? Certainly this last line of defense would have recognized that the only similarity between the actual delivery address on the letter and my physical address – out of a total of three lines of critical information – was the “41.”

It is just so incredible to me that this letter made it to my mailbox.

So what are we doing with the letter? We’ve placed it inside another envelope, along with a note explaining how it was delivered to us and we’ll be taking it to the post office tomorrow for re-delivery. Hopefully that package won’t be delivered to my house next week.

Boomer turned three yesterday. We had Mom and Vern, and the Lang’s over for a light casual dinner and cake and ice cream.

The Cake.

The Birthday Boy with his cake.

After a long and happy evening.

This is Brittany and Danielle as they were leaving after Boomer’s Birthday Party.

Boomer and I went for a walk the other night after dinner. I like the hat he wore.

I ran across this idea of open face sandwiches whereby each diner would create and name a tasty and visually appealing food item.

The Smørrebrød (originally smør og brød, meaning “butter and bread”) is a Danish word for the sandwich, and I’ve read that is an art form there.

The idea I had was to buy all the potential ingredients, do a little preparation, set up an assembly line, the send every one through with the goal of creating contrasts in color, flavor and texture in a single sandwich.

So the whole dinner was planned, I told the story to everyone to get the enthused about the event, and to get the creative juices flowing.

So I boiled a few red potatoes and thinly sliced them. I also had some sliced Granny Smith apples, shredded carrots, chopped red onion, sliced Roma tomatoes, and a sliced red bell pepper. Here is the “veggie” area of the assembly line.

For the bread I remembered making my own croûtons once where I sort of fried the chunks of bread in bacon grease. This time, I cooked six pieces of hickory smoked bacon and use the grease to quickly “toast” our bread. We used Country Potato or Pumpernickel.

So starting with your slice of bread, add some mayo, Dijon mustard, or vegetable cream cheese spread, then add a selection from the meat plate – turkey, roast beef, ham, bacon, salmon, or tuna.

Move down the line adding lettuce or spinach. (And something from the previously mentioned veggie station.)

Next stop is the cheese island. We had Havarti, Cheddar, Swiss, and Parmesan.

Salt and pepper to taste, then put it under the broiler to melt the cheese.

Grab yourself a nice winter ale, and you’re all set for a meal fit for a viking.

So that was the idea, preparation, and process. Here we are going over the rules.

On to the creations.

#1. Amanda made the BAMMF. (Bacon, Apple, Melted, Meat, Fun.)
Potato bread toasted in bacon grease, mayo, bacon, turkey, ham, lettuce, apple, cheddar, and swiss cheese.

#2. Becca made the Freak Your Freak. (Because this is weird?)
Potato bread toasted in bacon grease, ham, turkey, roast beef, lettuce, shredded carrots, apples, Havarti, cheddar, swiss, and Parmesan cheeses.

#3. Danielle made the Home-wrecker. (I’m clueless.)
Pumpernickel toasted in bacon grease, veggie cream cheese, turkey, bacon, spinach, apple, tomato, salt/pepper, Parmesan cheese.

#4. Nana made the 5-B’s (Big, Beautiful, Bountiful, Bouncy, Breadly) (Now that’s weird.)
Potato bread toasted in bacon grease, veggie cream cheese, turkey, ham, potatoes, red onion, Havarti, cheddar, carrots, mixed salad.

#5. Tami made Death by Bacon, with cheese.
Pumpernickel toasted in bacon grease, mayo, bacon, turkey, ham, roast beef, potato, salt/pepper, apple, carrots, red peppers, cheddar, swiss, and Parmesan cheeses.

#6. I made two. The first one is Popeye’s Power.
Pumpernickel toasted in bacon grease, veggie cream cheese, salmon, spinach, potato, carrots, red onions, crumbled tuna, Havarti, tomato, and a generous amount of fresh ground black pepper.

#7. My second one was a Mini Roast Beef Radish.
Half a slice of Pumpernickel toasted in bacon grease, Dijon mustard, roast beef, radishes, carrots, red onions, apple, Havarti, Parmesan, and a generous amount of fresh ground black pepper.

We all had a great time. Even the Snownun Amanda made after she finished her sandwich.

Some of you might be asking about Boomer and his sandwich. Alas, he didn’t make one as he is feeling a little under the weather. Not to worry though – he did find time to sit at the table with us and be a good little Nordic boy.