Horseplay

Cripes, a whole week without blogging. Well I've been five days without internet access and that was rather annoying.

Mercury must be retrograde because we've been five days without post too. Our bloody postboxes have been vandalised.
Canada Post, in its infinite wisdom, feels it unnecessary to deliver post to our doors, so it makes us have a bunch of pigeon holes with lockable covers. Sadly, they seem to be made from aluminium and thus easy to jimmy open. The Friday before last, mercifully after I'd collected our post, this is exactly what happened. In spite of the Post Office having a legal obligation to deliver your post to you, they don't. In fact, the boxes belong to us, and we have to replace them, at a cost of $4,000 the set. AND....we have to schlepp down to the sorting office between the hours of 10.00 and 14.00 or some equally ridiculous time frame, and collect our own mail.
I did this today.

The lady who helped me kept shaking her head and saying how terrible it is that it's going to take so long to replace the boxes. She said it was down to the property manager. I told her that in fact, the people who make these mail box systems have a backlog - it turns out they are easily vandalised, who knew!? - and we won't be getting a new one until September or October.

She handed me one piece of post. She said that couldn't be right and went off to search in the bowels of the sorting office for more. She came back and shook her head once more. She wondered whether 'he' (presumably the postie) had decided to take the mail out anyway to see whether the boxes had been repaired.
Oh well.

Meanwhile, at the weekend retreat, the trailer which shall henceforth be known as 'The Static', the U.S. Americans seemed to be celebrating the fourth of July on the third of July. Fireworks were going off all day, intermittently, there was a pool party in and around the family pool and somehow, a siren seemed to also be going all day. By the time we woke up on the fourth itself, everything seemed to be still and silent. Well, except for the siren which we could hear feebly going in the distance.

In the woodland area of the park, life carried on much as usual, children played, dogs went for walks along the trails and people sat out in their little gardens, and in the evenings had fires in their firepits.
One of them, having been reminded by friends about a week-and-a-half ago of the existence of Pimms, had been longing for same since then, and had been unable to get any, but she suffered (mostly) silently.

The other side of the swimming pools and tennis courts, there is a covered wagon, such as would have carried families across the wild west. The other side of the covered wagon are the real RVs, the ones that actually go somewhere, and they are all parked on a gravelled area around the garbage bins.

In the 'adult pool', the one in which I swim lengths and then leave, there were some lads and their ladies, probably, I decided, from the gravelly area, messing about. One of the girls told the lads not to splash the lady (me). 'Can't you read?' she asked the lad, pointing at the list of rules, printed at the insistence of Whatcom County.
'No horseplay' it says.
'I definitely think that's Horseplay,' I said.
I love the word Horseplay, it covers a multitude of tentative sins.

The sign also says you have to be 21.

The lads and lasses looked sheepish and then the girls made the boys get out. I think it's because they heard my English accent.
Tim Roth has done wonders for us Brits on this side of the Pond.