Tuesday, June 2, 2009

It's In The Mail

Packing things to send away is always strange and slightly idiotic. The whole mess is only made worse when Dina joins me. We both have a tendency to go a bit overboard. Thankfully we use flat rate boxes and then just stuff the crap out of them.

For some reason, we are compelled to send things that I doubt anyone actually wants. Once I crossed the state line into Mass, I found myself suddenly sending people maple syrup. It didn't matter to me that they probably had no need, it was just something I couldn't stop myself from doing. Something happens to your brain when you live here, where you suddenly think maple is a crusade. You must promote maple, sing its praises, adore maple, worship at it's sappy bucket, and scorn any product with fake maple flavor. The cult of maple is all powerful. There's no resisting it, so you might as well not try. If I try, I fear I may find a sugar maple tree limb in my bed in the morning, or be attacked by the sap bucket in a dark alley.

Even if I can resist the temptation to send syrup, I get suckered into sending baked goods by Dina. She loves to bake, but what the hell do you do with 6 dozen cookies? I know! Pawn them off on anyone silly enough to give you their address. So there we were tonight baking away until 2am. It wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't decided to experiment. Just a note, peanut butter cookies using fresh chocolate peanut butter are not as spiffy as they sound. It was sad really.

I'm glad to say we finished all our boxes. At least this time there was no fire. (Dina doesn't let me play with that anymore). There was an unfortunate incident with a hot baking sheet and my hand. On the plus side, I can now rob a bank because I have no finger prints on one hand.

I'm just happy I remembered to slip some Spider-man stickers in with the birthday/mother's day/father's day box I sent to Arizona. Something tells me that compared to all of the things I sent to the adults, the 99 cent Spider-man stickers for my nephew will be the hit.

Here's hoping we all stumble across something small that makes us smile. We all need Spider-man stickers from time to time.

"Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something." -- Ernest Hemingway

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