Pioneer Spirit

Mine’s a large one, at the very least coz my glass is empty! Spirit’s all gone.

How did they do it? The original pioneers who trekked into new territories to find new land, with supplies, friends and home comforts following on behind? I have no idea and to be honest I’m fast running out of energy. I mean, I know Edmonton is in the middle of nowhere, and even people who’ve visited still don’t realise how far North and West it is in Canada (Mum, Natasha…) but it’s not like we’re in a completely new part of the world! As for our house, the estate has been here for 4 years but apparently our little corner, with our house sitting on it’s own in the street, is causing Canada Post a few problems.

Having sent friends the wrong postal code I nearly died when I got to the main Post Office on moving day to be told ‘your post code is wrong’. 30 minutes of the wrong book being looked into and I breathed a huge sigh of relief as we found it and we did exist (yeay) and I was given a new key for the mailbox, with the promise that the lock would be changed by the end of the weekend.

5 days later and our key still didn’t work in the lock. Another call to Canada Post – “who are you?” After some explaining I determined that our mailbox is yet to be built, but not to worry: now we know you exist, we’ll collect your mail at the central depot and ship it to the nearest post office.

Today, armed with my retrieval number (after another 20 minute call, explaining who I was and where we lived) I fronted up to the nearest post office as there were apparently 4 items of mail for me and Roh. Given I now know of 2 returned to the UK and 2 returned in Edmonton I was greatly excited by the prospect of actually receiving our mail. I also wanted to set up the redirect from our old place to the new one. So imagine my surprise when the mail was not for us, but for a new house just round the corner, and the computer said ‘address unknown’.

For now it seems we’re harder to find than a sober university student. Sadly I’m now missing my drivers’ license, mortgage papers, cheque books, birthday and house moving cards and who knows what else???

Good news is internet and phone are working. A small hitch as one of the workers had knocked over the connection box, but that was fixed pretty quickly. Oh, and the EPCOR man arrived and fitted the water meter to the house next door. Luckily we’d seen him and managed to call him back - it’s all good fun here.

We do love our new house, it is all good really. We’ve been putting our wedding spending money to good use on exciting items like curtain rods and salad spinners. The sofas hopefully arrive in the next few weeks too so we’ll have something to sit on in our new lounge. Urban Barn has been proving to be a delightful source of good stuff, though I might need to start working there and get a staff discount ;o)

Hopefully next time I write we’ll exist, until then…