canada post

A neat thing about living in a house is that parcels actually get delivered here. This is quite a novelty as during the years we lived in our condo, our parcels only got delivered about 1/2 the time.

The rest of the time, there would be a card in the mailbox with a sloppy tick mark indicating that there was no answer at such and such a time.

BULL. Because almost always I had been upstairs and nobody had buzzed up, never mind actually coming to the door and knocking. After a while, I discovered that often they didn't even have the damned parcel with them. I'd corner them in the lobby demanding my amazon order and they'd make some stupid story up about how the card was from yesterday and they didn't have the parcel today.....even though I'd checked the mailbox the previous day and there was no card then.

I complained regularly but never heard anything back from Canada Post.

One of the reasons I was so ticked at having to get the damned parcel was that the depot I had to go to was staffed by two of the rudest women I've ever met. When you put the card down on the counter, they'd look at it like you just dropped a piece of shit on their fine dining room table. They'd kind of spin it around with a pen, peer at it suspiciously, grunt, disappear into the back for an interminable time and more often than not, reappear without the parcel.

Not here. Next.

All in a bored drawl. And barely comprehensible; only years of working for immigration enabled me to sort through their Cantonenglish.

But, but, I'd splutter. It says on the card it's here after 5 pm today.

They'd barely look at me, shove the card back at me and dissmissively announce try tomorrow.

I complained about them too.

So imagine my delight at the fact that a real guy actually knocks on my door and gives me my parcel. Last month, it was an order from PetMeds. We chatted about our dogs and why it was that dog meds were cheaper in the US but human meds were cheaper in Canada.

Yesterday it was an amazon order and the first words out of his mouth were "How's your dog doing?"

That is service.

Of course the only reason he remembers me at all is that I figure I must be one of the few people he actually finds at home. This is one of those eerie suburban neighbourhoods which are pretty empty during the day. Just a couple pensioners puttering in a garden and the weird homeschooling family.

And speaking of homeschooling - what came in my box is the SOTW vol 4 (CD's) and activity book. I have no clue anymore where we're supposed to be in history. I'm just plugging away at it. I also have Our Island Story and yippee! I just noticed there is an abridged version of it on CD! I would have preferred an unabridged reading but really, I'll take what I can get.

We now DO history by all sitting around on the couch listening to someone read us a story. I usually knit. BTW, I do have a small complaint: Jim Weiss reads SOTW too fast. I have some of his other recordings and the pacing is nicer on these so I know he can read at a decent rate. In fact, usually his delivery is wonderfully paced. I'm wondering if there was some cost considerations in packaging these and they wanted to make sure they'd fit into a certain number of CD's, because he seems to rush through some of the sections and I always feel like we've galloped through.

What worked pretty well was to listen to a CD twice during the week. This gives it time to kind of sink in and percolate. And yes, we would do an entire CD - a whole hour - not just a chapter. In a good week we would go through the review questions, do some of the activities, read some other books. Most of the time, we didn't though. At the end of the 4 months (don't ask me how come it took 4 months to listen to 11 CD's when I listened to 1 a week. It's a homeschooling time warp thing), I started at the beginning again and listened to them one more time before calling it done.

Ooops I just noticed that while I ordered the SOTW CD's and activity book, I completely forgot the actual book, which is ridiculous because I use that as well.

I guess the mailman will be coming by again soon.