266) There is so much to be seen in this photo. The King Street Station, not one, but two massive sports stadiums, an olde timey three-ball street lamp, and the only mailbox to take home three medals from the summer Olympics (for diving). I’ll let you figure out which is which.
265) I would like to present to you the winner of the “Tidiest Mailbox in Maple Leaf of the Week” award! This fine graffiti-free box has held this title for a record 387 straight weeks… it would have been a much longer streak had it not been for an unfortunate bird incident that happened right before a critical judging period seven years ago.
264) Did you know that mailboxes hate sandwich board signs? I mean really, really hate them? For the longest time I thought this was because they were afraid people would be so distracted by their bright colors that they’d completely overlook the mailboxes. It turns out, however, that the true reason is far… well… I’m not really sure how to describe it. Mailboxes hate sandwich board signs because they occasionally blow over and the noise startles them.
263) Long-time readers will remember this tragic post where I attempted to visit the box located outside the old Seattle Times building. It was a crushing blow that almost derailed this entire project, but somehow… somehow I persevered. It has taken many months, but now I’m ready to introduce you to the box that’s outside the NEW Seattle Times building. Yeah, it’s not as good of a box as the other one, but it’s all we’ve got. It’s all we’ve got.
262) Out for a walk with my friend Melissa and her two dogs (the dogs are tiny and may be hard to spot in this photo). The sign commanded that we stop, so we did. The seats were welcoming, so we sat. The mailbox looked on. The quaint cafe provided no outdoor table service, so we left.
261) This box seemed really, really jittery. At first I thought it was because he is stationed outside a Starbucks, and maybe he was picking up too much second-hand caffeine. But, that’s not it. Look up… there are a lot of wires overhead, all carrying some serious bucketfuls of electricity. This poor guy lives in constant terror of even one of those lines coming down, totally frying his metal body. I had nothing more to say, so I walked away.
260) Believe it or not, this mailbox sits outside a legitimate yacht club… the Seattle Yacht Club, to be precise. You might expect, therefore, that this box would be rather, well, snobby. Pretentious. A jerk-face. Happily, that’s not the case at all! As it turns out, this box grew up in a very middle-class household and didn’t get the job at the yacht club until later in life. He’s very well grounded, but still enjoys looking at the boats.
259) Me: “Hey box, c’mon around the corner so I can get your picture.”
Box: “I’m good where I am.”
Me: “You don’t have to be embarrassed about the graffiti, just come over here.”
Box: “That’s a stupid shirt.”
Me: “We’re done here.”
258) Observant readers know that I always title my post with the neighborhood in which the current box resides. It’s usually pretty easy to make this designation, but sometimes… sometimes it’s not so clear. Take today’s mailbox, for example. According to the maps, it lives on the very outer edge of Queen Anne, but any reasonable person would say that’s quite a stretch. I tried to ask the box which neighborhood it aligns with, but it just hissed at me and went back to sleep.
257) Here we have yet another box that I was absolutely thrilled to meet, because I was not sure it actually existed. The data said it was there, but I couldn’t spot it using Google Streetview so I feared that it was an ex-box. But there it was, tucked away 150 feet off the main road, hiding up against a building. Some boxes are content to live quiet lives… this is one of those boxes.
Production Note: With this, I have now posted every mailbox south of I-90.