Friday. Paul got up and was gone early this morning. He said goodbye but it was dark out and I did not look at the clock. His plan is to be back on Wednesday evening, so less than a week. But, he has a lot to do with his house in Missouri before he comes back down.
Our mail got delivered this morning. From the giant stack that was delivered, I would guess that this is the first real mail delivery that we have gotten in over a month. The girls’ Valentine’s Day cards, for example, were just delivered today. And we got two issues of Game Informer today, and those come a month apart. And since we don’t know how long before the first one came and how long after the second one came that we’ve not been getting mail, it could easily be closer to two months. My driver’s license, that was due a month ago, was here today, too. Definitely something seriously wrong with our mail for a very long time.
One of the issues with traditional mail, as we realized here, is that there is no mechanism for letting you know when mail items are expected. So not getting mail doesn’t tell you that you should have gotten mail. There is no realistic way to know that mail isn’t being delivered. All you know is that you don’t get mail, you have no idea if you were supposed to or not. This is especially bad today, with the proliferation of junk mail, because as it turns out, until a week ago we have been receiving a huge pile of mail every day, but it was all exclusively the junk mail and none of our own mail! We had no idea, because we weren’t expecting anything and mail kept coming every day. We even did a mail suspension while we were in Georgia and New York that we turned back on the day that we returned, but apparently only junk mail resumed and the “real” mail was lost during that time. What a mess, and what a bad system. There’s no verification mechanism, at all!
So after working this morning, we made a major family trip to the local nursery this afternoon. The girls have never gone plant shopping before, so this was decently special. We were there for hours, it is a huge facility. We ended up getting some herbs like lemon thyme, rosemary, lavender, dill, etc. Those things we are going to plant in large pots in the atrium. Each of the girls picked out a small pot and a one dollar flower for themselves. Luciana was channeling her grandmother and picked a yellow marigold, just like we had all over when I was growing up. Marigolds were the first flowers that I grew on my own, as well, when I was little. And Liesl picked an impatient. It’s a very small haul for our first day, we were mostly investigating the options more than anything.
It was an exhausting day, the girls were so excited and needed to pull me in a million directions. They were having a good time, but it was mentally taxing. All three of them needed to show me things and “talk at me” continuously for a few hours straight while we were there. I was totally burnt by the time that we were done.
Back home, Dominica and I put in some time walking around the house talking about different garden and lawn options, trying to come up with a plan that makes sense for us. Right now, our biggest priority is getting the front box full of lavender.
Dominica and the girls went into the atrium and planted four pots of herbs and flowers. Liesl and Luciana thought that that was quite fun. We have one large pot of mixed herbs. One medium pot of just dill, because I love dill and hope that we can grow enough that we are able to really use fresh dill for cooking all of the time, and then each of the girls has their small pot with their flowers in it.
Dominica made veggie burgers for dinner, which we ate while watching some British gardening shows for inspiration.
After dinner, the girls and I set up the Wii U in the living room. They had been asking me to play video games with them all day. They both really wanted to play Nintendoland. We played a few rounds of the ghost hunting game, but Luciana finds it too intense. Then we switched to the Pikmin game inside Nintendoland and had a really fun hour or two of playing that as a team. It was a good evening.
Got the kids getting ready for bed at eleven thirty. Then wrapped up in the office and was off to bed a little after midnight. Luciana did not want to read our story again tonight. Liesl has been very sad about that, as she’s been wanting to read it all week. So we decided that tomorrow night we are reading it for sure.