So I had my second swing at Christmas yesterday. Or at least the presents part of Christmas. My box of Christmas cheer from the family arrived yesterday. I was happy…or at least I was happy once I eventually got the box. Let me share with you this experience…

Let me start by saying that yesterday was probably the hottest day we’ve had so far here. It was HOT! The kind of hot that makes the paint peel on your truck and causes your sunglasses to leave a permanent scar on your nose when you put them on after they’ve been sitting on the dashboard all morning. The kind of hot that makes you a believer in global warming.

My friend Corina told me that the notice that I’d been waiting for had arrived (my mail goes to her house). A box from Canada! Along with a scattering of Christmas cards as well. I could pick it all up at 3 PM when she had a break in some meetings. You could say I was excited I guess…

After picking up the notice that I’d need to get my box, I was racing off to the post office…in rush hour traffic…which is to say I was mostly sitting in unmoving traffic and honking my horn. For some reason, the post office was built a block off the main plaza in downtown. That probably made sense twenty years ago…not so much now. By the time I got downtown and parked, I was racing the clock. I rushed into the office where the packages from overseas are kept…and then helped a nice lady and man search for my box for half an hour in the midst of stacked and kind of shifting piles of packages.

Eventually I found the one with my loving mother’s handwriting…and discovered that, to my dismay, she’d put the value of the contents of the packing slip. We’d talked about that. It meant that I was going to be paying some tax. A lot of tax as it turned out… $50 on a $100 box.

Let’s just leave that alone, and go to the next part of the story.

You can’t pay the taxes at the post office. You have to pay them at a nearby bank. This bank had a name that sounded different from the way it was written. That caused some confusion. I was racing around looking for a building that didn’t actually exist. Although many people were helpful in giving me directions to this non-existent building. Even the taxi driver I hired, who drove me around for twenty minutes looking for the place.

After forty minutes…running 15 blocks…a twenty minute cab ride to nowhere…I was back at the post office trying to get better directions. The man looked at me in confusion and asked me what the heck I’d been doing for the past hour. Looking for the bank, I replied. It’s two blocks away, he said…how hard is that?

Harder than you’d think obviously!

I made it to the bank and back to the post office in record time. And yes…it was only two blocks away. I thought about waiting until I got home to open my gifts…but only for about 10 seconds. Then I ripped into that baby…actually while I was still driving. Mom didn’t skimp on packing tape, that’s for sure. If I’d had an accident, it would have been her fault.

In the end, my truck looked like our living room at home on Christmas morning. Wrapping paper everywhere! =) My family was good to me!! It helps living on another continent. I’m the proud owner of some decent Saskatchewan Roughrider merchandise and a new jacket that I’m still waiting for it to be cold enough to wear. I have it in my truck just in case. My sister also gave me a three pack of some good Canadian winter socks…which there might be one day in July (our winter) that’ll be cold enough to wear them. But that’s okay…I can wear one pair in the morning, one pair in the afternoon and one pair in the night. I showed them to Isabel and she started laughing and said, “They really don’t understand where you live do they?”

That’s okay Natasha! I like them!!

Anyhow…that was Christmas for me. It came earlier than last year at any rate, when the box showed up in April…