As I sit here the day after Steve’s birthday, I feel a bit bewildered. How did we get here? The year went fast, but it feels especially fast since this year had no great big fun events since March.
Wow, I totally suck and never commented on Steve turning 40 last year. I guess to be fair, he never mentioned me turning 40 either…so neither of us suck. It seems that we turned 40 in the right year. We could actually see people, and I was able to pull off something I could have never done this year. This year, I only managed to buy him dinner, some goofy treats and a subscription to a website that ended up being a combined birthday and Christmas present.
As for last year’s extravaganza, I admit it. I stole the idea from him. When my 40th birthday was coming, he had the crazy idea of buying or making me a little something every day for 40 days leading up to my birthday. But the countdown started before he was ready so he couldn’t pull it off. I decided to give it a try. It was hard and took some determination, but I squeaked through.
I got him everything from little mp3’s of some of our nephews that could be turned into ringtones to lottery tickets and candy to treats from the old Dutch store in Guelph that a friend brought for me. It was fun to try and figure out how I would do this…and I had to keep on my toes. I could have never in my wildest dreams pulled that off this year.
But I have to say I’m pretty proud of what we managed to pull off this year in terms of buying Christmas presents. It may be a long time before everyone gets them, but I hope they will like them all. The cool thing is almost all of it was bought online, and we tried our best to buy local as much as we could. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close. I may need to stick close to home, but goddammit, I’m going to try and make sure we have stuff to give people at Christmas.
Maybe this is a thing I do all the time, but I felt like I just couldn’t stop looking for possible gifts for people for Christmas. I went a little hog-wild in a few cases. No matter what I picked up for people, I never felt like I’ve done enough. Now I’m going to hope that some of those Christmas presents get where they’re supposed to, since some of them are going through the mail.
And about that. You would think that UPS, a company whose main purpose is delivering parcels, wouldn’t be dirt awful this year. I know that we’re shipping more things than ever, but good sweet merciful hell! I’ve never seen a company get it so wrong so often! I didn’t think they were historically this bad.
I had 5 packages that were supposed to be handled by UPS over the span of a couple of weeks. Of those 5, they managed to lose 3. Well, by some miracle, they got one of those 3 back, but losing 3 out of 5 parcels for one person is not a good ratio. Of the remaining 2, one of them was my replacement credit card. They were supposed to make sure that I actually got it. But this person knocked loudly on the door, dropped it outside the door and started moving away. Thanks for making sure the credit card got to its rightful owner, Mr. UPS guy.
So let’s go over this parcel by parcel. Parcel 1 arrived safely before I knew how bad the problem was. Parcel 2 is somewhere out there. It was allegedly delivered to us when no one was home. Um? Somebody was here all day that day, as we are most of the time these days because of this lovely pandemic. If they knocked, they had the softest knock ever. Then it was returned to sender, but not even the sender got it back. The same goes for parcel 3, and the sad part about that is it contains an item that went out of stock. Thankfully another store replaced that.
Parcel 4 was a replacement for Parcel 3, minus the out of stock item. It went to the wrong address and was signed for by some dude named JJ. I felt like a bit of a detective. I went down to the rental office and asked if there was anyone in this building or the other one named JJ, or did someone who worked there go by JJ? They confirmed that nobody had that name. So I called UPS and chewed out some poor sap who eventually confessed that they sent it to the wrong address. When she said that she would launch an investigation, without thinking I said “You bet your boots you will!” They said they would try to get it back. I wasn’t holding my breath and was making alternate plans to get the items that were lost…when UPS showed up with the box! As I was taking it out of the driver’s hand she said “Oh…what’s your name?” It was like an afterthought, like “Oh yeah, I’m supposed to check who I’m handing this to.” So, she would have almost delivered it to the wrong address all over again.
And of course Parcel 5 was the credit card that they hucked in the general direction of the door and took off before Steve managed to open the door. So much for having me sign for it, like the bank swore up and down they would.
And these people have been entrusted with some of the Coronavirus vaccine! JJ had better get ready for some errant parcels. I hope he has a good freezer.
And apparently, not only do I live in a building with people who run off with other people’s grocery carts, they also steal Amazon packages too. Either that, or the driver took a picture of our door and then took off with the package, never setting it down. They certainly didn’t knock. Whoever took it, I hope they like socks because that’s all they got. But seriously, people. If it’s not yours, don’t take it. If you get someone else’s stuff and you can tell where it’s supposed to go, give it back! It’s that simple!
Steve is still waiting for stuff to arrive. I’m not sure what he’s expecting, but he keeps messing with my head about what it is. I am definitely mystified about what he got me.
This Christmas just keeps getting wackier and wackier. For a while, it looked like everybody else, in Steve’s family at least, could get together in the same place except us. Now, that’s not looking possible. But at least we do have the ability to do the virtual thing. Thank goodness for that. Whatever ends up happening, it will be memorable in a strange way.
It may also be memorable because if I get brave enough, I might try and make the Christmas cookies that mom always makes. I’ve never tried to make them all by myself before. Hopefully I don’t screw them up.
Whatever you end up doing, I hope you find a way to make this Christmas merry. When we can finally see everybody again, it’ll be all the more special.
I don’t think I commented on my own 40th birthday, so don’t feel bad. And I’m still amazed you pulled that string of gifts thing off. I failed at doing it in sequence, but hopefully the giant box of Picards made up for it. There may have even been 40 different things in there for all I know. I wish I could remember if it was delivered by UPS. It made it on the first try, so probably not.
That credit card thing still kind of blows my mind. They treated it so lackadaisically that I was pretty sure it must have been the thing that got returned to sender not getting returned to sender after all. Forget having you sign for it, they didn’t even ask me who I was or make me sign anything. Dude just dumped it on the ground outside. Had I not happened to be close to the door, he wouldn’t have even been able to mumble a thing about where it was lying like he did.
That was a lot of delicious, delicious Picard’s. We had it for months!
It was fun. Let’s go dig something random out of the big ol box!
So apparently the issue with parcels no. 3 and 4 wasn’t totally UPS’s fault. Apparently somebody put the wrong, or incomplete, info on the packing slip and that’s why it didn’t make it to me. Some non-JJ-ish woman just brought Parcel 3 back to the store in complete and utter confusion.
What I want to know is how a packing slip gets screwed up and becomes incomplete when all of the information is entered? Like I watched you write everything down. It was there. We were shopping together.