The lone dwarf left me a tablet and a car, for which the tablet is apparently the key. One of the pleasures of visiting the North Pole is how they give you the run of the place, and why not… Who’s going to steal from a company that gives everything away. So I’ve been wandering in amazement!

Now if you’re into logistics at all you’ve probably heard of UPS’s legendary CACH (Chicago Area Consolidation Hub) which defines large scale logistics. CACH employs 8000 people and sorts over a thousand semitrailer loads a day, they don’t even mess with route trucks. The volume is so huge that CACH has it’s own exit off the Interstate and pretty much it’s very own intermodal yard on BNSF’s 4 track main line right next door. Santa’s new logistics hubs dwarf CACH and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach combined. And yes, hubs as in plural… With the promise of open water Arctic shipping by century’s end and populations fleeing northward from global warming and rising sea levels, Santa’s building a ring of these mega logistics hubs around the Arctic Ocean. The scale of everything is huge, from floating docks that can rise with the sea levels and sit rock steady because they use wave action to generate electricity for the complex. In fact, Santa’s new logistics hubs are so energy efficient that LEED is having to develop a whole new level of certification for them. The scale continues inside the hub, where “dumpers’ based on Segway technology open container doors and tilt the container to unload it by the “controlled avalanche” method, while sensors look for too fast unloading and in microseconds reduce the tilt to prevent damage. And the conveyors those containers are being unloaded on are the size you’d expect to see loading coal cars, not toys. The same scale repeats at the airport… Remember the Ural BS-111 military cargo plane, whose development was abandoned as the USSR fell apart a quarter century ago because there was only one Siberian military airport that could accommodate it? Ural’s greatest airplane will soon be back in production exclusively for Santa and can take off with room to spare on Santa’s new kilometer wide runways. And that’s just for the inbound supply flights- With but a 48 hour worldwide delivery window and no one to complain about sonic booms, Santa’s placed a huge order that will put the Concord back into production…

And speaking of no one to complain, there doesn’t seem to be no one here, period… Haven’t seen a single creature, Elfin or otherwise, in hours. But the packages keep flying by and the trucks and trains and planes keep roaring off into the night…