Righteous indignation

Today in the post, a letter I had sent to a friend was returned to me for insufficient funds. Said letter had spent so many weeks mouldering on a table before actually making it into an envelope and then to the post office, that its return was cause for great dismay. Bloody hell! I immediately fell into a rage at the stupidity of the employee at the post office who had sold me the wrong stamp and puffed myself with righteous anger. I was ready to be the hand of vindication, the sword of all that is just, I was ready to roar my indignation.

Of course, there is a back story. I do not fly into rages at the slightest provocation, although I will admit, I do tend to feel the casual slights, the vague injustices and the mild set-backs of life a little more severely than my more sanguine friends (What do you mean there is no strawberry sorbet! Oh my god, what am I going to do?!!).

But the back story is this: the guy at the post office is a jerk. He never smiles. He is grumpy all the time. He is never helpful. He never offers seasonal greetings or comments about the weather. His stoney-faced reserve drives me bananas. And here was my chance to finally vent all of my pent up irritation at the poor man because I now had a reason, rather than the rather vague, you're being rude, which works with my son but probably not with blase government employees.

Off I marched to the post office, letter in hand, ready to incinerate the man with my righteous rage. He was lounging against a wall talking on the phone when I came in. What chatting during work hours?! My shoulders hunched and I was read to pounce.

Some people have an amazing ability to diffuse anger and our friend at the post office had this trait. While taking absolutely no blame, he got me to remove my useless stamp from the envelope and add it to another one. He embarked on a speech about re-using stamps and the importance of doing it sneakily or else I would be fined. He was on my side after all! But wait, it was his fault I had to re-use the stamp in the first place. These thoughts faded to the back of my mind. He added an extra stamp, waved away my offer to pay and sent me on my way.

I left feeling like I'd gotten a deal. Righteous anger melted like ice-cream in the sun.

Writing about nothing (for GC)

When I started this blog, it was in the hopes that having an audience would push me to write; write more, write better. But sometimes I have nothing to say. Or what I have to say is personal or silly or inflammatory. This is not the venue for such thoughts. So what do I write when I have nothing interesting, funny or intriguing to share?

Here it is:

I got a flat tire today. I couldn't find my patch kit. I did find a spare inner tube. The inner tube is not the right size for my wheel. It took a lot of sweating in the back yard before I figured that out. My hands are dirty and sore. My clothes are dirty. I have an appointment with the bike repair shop tomorrow morning.

I was recently told that buckwheat pancake mix has to rest for at least an hour before it can be made into pancakes. I had never heard this before. I have always mixed the batter and then thrown the mix onto the frying pan, making lovely flat grey crepes. I made pancakes this morning. I should say, I tried to make pancakes this morning. After three attempts ended in the garbage, and I tried two different oils, my son had to resign himself to a bowl of cereal which he did in a rather unsportsmanlike manner ("BUT I WANT PANCAKES! On a PLATE!"). I blame the new bottle of frying oil but part of me wonders if too much information is a bad thing.

The postal strike has meant that I have received a new phone bill every few days for the past week, each time with a larger and larger amount due.

While a polyester-cotton sheet mix may seem like a good idea at the store, the scratchy nights that ensue are not.

I don't do well in crowded insectariums.

There. That is my bit of nothing for today

Nosebleeds and things that go crunch in the night

As the title suggests, we are just back from a few days of camping. I was wary before we set off, D- having made clear that he did not like camping last summer by endless tantrums and general naughtiness. I had found this quite worrying as I had envisioned my life with a child as being generally, if not literally, one big camping adventure. I decided to try again this year, decreasing our stay outdoors from a heady eight days (last year) to two nights in a private campground.

The website showed a play-ground and a man-made lake, and mini-golf, and horse shoe games. The reality was slightly different: the lake was almost empty and the water stagnant, the mini golf consisted of a field with some numbered flags, and there was not a horseshoe to be found. D- loved the water slide, zipping from the top into my arms but on the seventh or eight go around, I slapped a horse-fly on my arm at the wrong time and he bashed into my head. A nose bleed for D-, a fat lip for me and the bug got away.

It got better from there. We met our friends. We found the perfect place on the river to swim, a little slip of sand stretched like a hand into the clear brown water. We relaxed and let the city leave our bones.

The first night, snug in our tent, I heard a crunching sound that I could not identify. I looked out into the night with my flashlight expecting to see the reflective eyes of a small animal but saw only the remains of our fire. Was it the last popping and fizzes of the embers? I went to sleep.

The next night, same thing: crunch, munch, scritch, scratch. I envisioned birds in the trees above, feasting on berries, or squirrels searching for nuts. I stepped out of the tent and the sound stopped. The moon was bright on the grass. D- turned in his sleep and sighed. There was nothing to see.

On the third day, we started to pack up our camping gear, slow to leave nature for the city. I pulled the fly from the tent and discovered what all the scratching had been about. Hundreds and hundreds of earwigs had climbed up the tent poles to nestle in the nylon tunnels made for holding up the tent. I hate earwigs. D- and I had great fun beating the tent with a stick, making the earwigs twirl and fly into the grass.

I love summer.