That is totally unheard of for me — usually on December 24 I am surrounded by unwrapped presents and crying ugly tears. But today I took all those wrapped presents to the post office! I even boxed them up correctly before leaving the house! With packing tape! And addressed them properly!
Now it’s up to the post office gods if they get there even close to on time for Christmas. I mailed a birthday gift last week that was supposed to take four days but still hasn’t arrived after seven — the gift has now missed the birthday, but hopefully it will show up before the Christmas gifts that I sent to the same address this afternoon.
And the post office was absolutely packed this afternoon. It’s a darn small parking lot on a good day and I sometimes struggle finding a spot I’m comfortable pulling in and backing out off (because that is totally a thing that I stress about all the time!). And today there was a line of cars just waiting to get into the parking lot! I don’t like to wait in a line just to get into a parking lot so I drove over to the grocery store to check some other stuff off my list.
By the time I drove back over to the post office, there was still a line of course and now there was a huge truck making a delivery to the CVS across the side street. The truck was pretty much blocking the back exit of the CVS parking lot and now folks looked really confused. So I did one more circle around the block and there was still a line, I did one more half circle of the block and then pulled into the CVS parking lot. It was packed there too, but I squeezed my car into what I really hoped was an actual parking spot. I was able to get in OK, but if that delivery truck didn’t finish up soon, I might be spending the night stuck in the CVS parking lot.
Now I know that I shouldn’t be parking at CVS if I’m not a customer so I went into CVS first (why am I so honest??), I figured that I could buy some Advil for the bathroom medicine cabinet. Well, everyone in my town must have had the same idea because it was packed in that store too. And Advil is pretty expensive at CVS, did you know that? It was almost $10 for a bottle with only 25 pills. I’m going to stick to Target from now on, sorry CVS.
After I waited in line for what felt like forever and paid for my $10 bottle of Advil, the line of cars to get into the post office parking lot was still ridiculous and that delivery truck was still there. I grabbed my two big reusable bags filled with packages out of the backseat of my car and crossed the street to the post office hoping that no one noticed that I had parked in the wrong parking lot. (Can you get towed for that??) I left the Advil and my receipt on my front sheet — hey, I’m honest!
I finally get into the lobby of the post office and there’s hardly anyone there. Sure there are three people at the windows being helped and three people in front of me in line, and maybe two people using the self-serve option in the lobby, but that doesn’t add up to all those damn cars parked in the lot. Where did all those people go?? Is there a secret post office entrance that I don’t know about?
I successfully mailed my seven Christmas packages in only about 10 minutes (cost me almost $80 — this was an expensive outing! Some of these gifts didn’t cost too much…) and walked out of there with a receipt with my seven tracking numbers for packages to be delivered both pretty close to my home and several that were traveling over 1,000 miles away. There was even one going to the west coast. And each of those packages surprisingly had an anticipated two-day priority delivery.
Now the fun starts — I’m going to go home and start obsessively checking these tracking numbers. What else do I have to do?? This pandemic has changed how we do holidays, folks aren’t traveling to see family and friends this year, so they are obviously mailing packages just like me and I’m sure the system has been overwhelmed. My new daily entertainment will be checking to see how fast (or even at all!) my gifts arrive at their destination.
But first I have to figure out how to back out of this parking spot…just how much stuff is that truck delivering?!?
Notes from a Self Quarantine 