by Kevin Burton
Come and get it, kids! Page 7 is now serving up quibbles and bits for the first time in 2024.
\ We’ve been helping you connect the dots since 2019 and we’re not about to stop now So here’s a train of thought that makes a few stops along the way…….
It’s possible you know the names of the people who lived at your current residence before you, because the post office brings you mail addressed to them.
People should be giving change of address information to the post office. Some don’t. Even the ones that do expire after a year I believe..
So it is that some lovely people in North Carolina sent what looks to be a holiday card to some people named Reed at our address.
Receiving this I did what I always do. I wrote in inch-high capital letters, “NOT AT THIS ADDRESS, and drew an arrow to the top left, to the return address. I put this back in the mailbox to go out.
A few days later I got this correspondence back. It has one of those dreaded yellow stickers on it and the sticker reads, “Unable to forward/for review.”
So I thought, alright Sugar Bear, I believe you. Don’t think you would lie to me about a thing like that. Unable to forward. I get it.
This however does not change the fact that these people, the Reeds, are NOT AT THIS ADDRESS!!!”
You with me? This is no longer a Burton problem. This is a postal problem.
Here’s what I did. This was me going postal. I got a sharpie that works and I carefully and thoroughly blacked out our address on the front of this mail and I will drop it into one of those big blue post office boxes when I get around to it. That I hope will end this saga.
But so help me, if this card somehow makes it back to my mailbox, you will read the next chapter in this story on a media outlet that gets a little more traffic than Page 7……
How come we test, but never throw away, sharpies that don’t work? Is that just me?…..
If you’re not a fan of college football, you may ask, what did college football ever do for me?
How about the invention of the 24/7 convenience store?
“In 1963, according to “Oh Thank Heaven: The Story of the Southland Corporation,” one store located near the University of Texas in Austin found itself unusually busy in the hours after a school football game, to the point that employees never had the chance to shut the doors for the night,” reads a story on the Interesting Facts website.
“When the situation unfolded again following the next football game, the company’s brain trust sniffed a potentially transformative moment for the business, and established 24-hour shops near Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth and Southern Methodist University in Dallas.”
More evidence, that night people rule the world…
Sometimes, you’re just determined to be happy. Sometimes you have switched the dial to “smile” and there’s nothing to be done about it.
Makes me wonder whether the cities I think I loved so well are just places I happened to be in when I was in an especially good mood.
Started thinking about this when I saw that nicenews.com ranked Sioux Falls, SD eighth on its list of ten happiest American cities for 2023.
Two Octobers ago my wife Jeannette and I took a wonderful unplanned meandering vacation trip north from Kansas landing for three nights in Sioux Falls.
“Sioux Falls,” also knows as the Queen City, ranked 21st for community and environment and 10th for well-being,” wrote Nice News.
“As South Dakota’s largest city, Sioux Falls has a vibrant and growing community where ‘small-town spirit meets big-city benefits,” including a vibrant arts scene, a thriving job market, and great public schools.”
On a similar vacation trip the summer after I graduated from college three friends and drove through Central and Eastern Mexico with Cuernavaca being my favorite place that we visited.
In a song about Cuernavaca called “Four-Part Mexican band.” I wrote of “sweet smiling faces and ooo just a trace of romance” and finished the song with “You’ve made a friend and I’ll be back again with a four-part Mexican band.”
But I don’t know much more about Sioux Falls and Cuernavaca than I do Omaha or Cedar Rapids or any other place I have been to more than once…..
Have you ever heard of smart water? Isn’t it false advertising just like thin mints, as in “it doesn’t make you smart/thin?….
Snippet from a family car trip (not a vacation):
Me: What’s the capital of Botswana?
Jeannette: “Capital of what? where is Botswana?”
Me: “I don’t know I thought you would tell me. You’re the one drinking smart water.”
Jeannette: “If that really was smart water I’d be drinking it by the gallon. And there are some people I might hand it out to.”
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