Clark, that there is an RV.

Today is not only a no-school day, but it is also a moon day, meaning that I have had a slow, lazy day with the kids, making truffles, roasting squash, and pulling teeth. In the interest of veracity, I should say “pulling one tooth”, rather than giving you the image that I’m spending my day with a pile of baby teeth. In any case, it’s been a great day, punctuated by the excitement I’m feeling over being nominated for the Canadian Weblog Awards in the categories of humour, life, and parenting. Not to be all, it’s an honour just being nominated, but it is, actually, an honour being nominated.

It’s a nice cap to what has been a very strange week. After last week’s bake sale, I swore that I wasn’t going to volunteer for anything for a while; after that decision I immediately signed up to provide a main dish for the teacher’s potluck dinner. What is wrong with me? In fact, I had three dishes to make for three separate potlucks in a 48 hour span, so I’m feeling a bit fatigued. I am attending the Ladies’ Advent Dinner with my mother at her church tomorrow, so I’m hoping the elderly ladies will enjoy my quinoa dish. Years ago someone brought hummus to the Ladies’ Advent Dinner and it caused a bit of a stir. I’m hoping a funky quinoa dish will show that I’m just as much a rebel as I used to be. It has quinoa and kale in it – and that is how you spell wild and crazy.

Other than cooking a lot of things, I’ve also spent a lot of time standing in lines this week. I went to Costco, on a Tuesday morning, and I was reminded why I hate going anywhere in the month of December. Costco is especially terrible, what with the hundreds of giant carts blocking the aisles and what seems to be a company policy against plowing the parking lot. I had to position my entire body at a 45 degree angle just to push the cart back to the car, and I felt like I had been actually run over by a stampede of giant carts by the time I got home. It was like when the kids were small and I had to walk two blocks to the grocery store with them in the back-to-front double stroller on snowy sidewalks. It was an epic workout, just going to the store for some crackers or milk.

After the exhausting Costco trip I headed to the post office for stamps. It’s December. People are mailing things. There was one employee working, and the lineup snaked around the post office. Twenty five minutes and a long, detailed conversation with the elderly woman in front of me about her grandchildren and the price of stamps later, I purchased my stamps and went home, where I was immediately faced with a “Missed Delivery” notice from Canada Post. I was instructed to pick up my parcel the following day at the post office that I had just left.

What can you do? The following day I headed for the post office, notice in hand. After standing in line for 20 minutes at the post office while the single person in front of me – an elderly man – had discussed every single option for sending a package to Manitoba, and asked about delivery estimates for what seemed like every possible location across the country, I decided to stop at the photo centre next door to the post office; I had received an email that the photo calendars I had ordered were shipped. I stood in line for another twenty minutes, only to be told that “shipped” did not mean “in store”. We’ll call you when it’s in, the lady at the counter said cheerfully, to which I very consciously smiled and answered as pleasantly as possible. I went home and one hour later received a phone call that my photo calendars were in.

So it’s been that kind of week. At least this is no longer parked in front of my house:

I looked out my window one morning and there it was. Clark, that there is an RV. I guess, technically, that a somewhat decrepit fifth wheel is not an RV.

When I was in university, I was taking a special statistics tutorial from a guy who, when he used “RV” for “Random Variable”, began discussing the actual recreational vehicle that one of our professors owned. It was the most simultaneously interesting and disturbing digression from statistics ever, since he talked about how he once peered into this professor’s RV (the recreational vehicle, not, obviously, the random variable) to see what was housed inside. I do not remember the result of this RV peeping Tom, but all these years later I remember wondering a) how the tutor knew where the RV was, and b) why he would want to see what was inside. Now, though, I understand his compulsion to look past the little frilled curtains, because I wanted to see if the mannequin was inside. I did not look, however, because the only thing weirder than me looking inside the strange fifth wheel in front of my house would be to find something like the mannequin. OR WORSE. In any case, the mystery of the RV’s appearance and disappearance – in the middle of winter, no less – will remain unsolved, just like the mystery of the mannequin.