Christmastime in the Lou

God bless the US Postal Service. Dr. B's present is in the mail and scheduled to get there Friday. And it only cost $5.10 to send it priority mail. No packaging fee, no 2nd day air, no Saturday delivery option. And they got me through the line in a reasonable amount of time for 4:30 pm the Wednesday before Christmas. 

I will grant that I clearly did not think this one through very carefully when I left my house today.  Sometimes you've just gotta take one for the team and go forward without thinking too much, lest you get lost in the process of how and not make any headway in the actual task.  It took me all afternoon to find his present (and the card), not get completely distracted along the way, figure out how I wanted to mail it and how much it was going to cost, and then get everything I needed and get to the post office before 5 pm.  And let me just say that the guy at the Brentwood FedEx must really think he is something else.  He had a whole speech prepared about all of my shipping and packaging options.  The man was a walking paragraph of small-print disclaimers and huge words in a quiet monotone.  How a person can have so much to say about getting an object from one place to another is beyond me.  I smiled politely, muttered "Holy cow" (and perhaps a little something else) on my way out, and went to Target across the street to buy my own packaging, which I then took to the Post Office down the road where the people were totally down to earth and got me situated in no time.  For a third of the cost.  Granted, I did have to wrap his present in the car (in the parking lot of the Brentwood Post Office where people kept walking by giving me the crazy look -- did I mention the Asian guy who pulled up next to me, saw me turning my car into a wrapping center, smirked, and opened his trunk to pull out a perfectly wrapped present ready to go?  It's always interesting watching other people judge you... while you're sitting right there) but you know what, I'll take it.  You do what you have to do.

It was a victory.  Eat your hearts out FedEx/UPS.

But then I came home tonight to find that my roommates had hung the elf from the ceiling fan...

I admit that this totally struck the dark side of me as hilarious, albeit a little morbid.  

I had planned on moving him tonight anyway because he'd been completely stationery since the last prank (a hot air balloon with real balloons that had since lost all their helium, having been left up for 2 weeks while I finished my semester at Lutheran and got my kids through their studio recital).  But STILL... I mean, c'mon.  Hang an elf??  Really?

So I promptly took the poor thing down and put him in a nice relaxing bath of mini marshmallows.  The toothbrush is supposed to be his scrub brush, since apparently there's very little market for elf-sized scrub brushes.

It's ridiculous, I know, but it's one of the few ways that I'm connecting with my roommates right now, who are all extremely absorbed in their own lives.  Admittedly I can be too at times, but who wants to live with people who only talk to you if you speak first?

I mean... at least they responded, right?