Sunday Shinanigans

/shinannignz/

• plural noun informal 1 secret or dishonest activity. 2 mischief.

— ORIGIN of unknown origin.

....and by that I mean, the Ma'am gets these ideas in her head, and then suddenly the calm life that I've come to enjoy here in Delden comes to a screeching halt.

There's cleaning, there's organising....it can be quite overwhelming.

I realise that this bed did need some sort of covering at some point, and so fine....today was the day. But why do I need to be involved?

I prefer to spend my time putting entries into the onboard gps in the car.

That particular activity wasn't exactly without it's moments of frustration, since the gps just doesn't like certain places. Not sure why. Amazingly, I did manage to put in the Eaton location in Vorst, Belgium, since we're headed that way on Tuesday. I did find the place once before, but it's so much more comforting when the nice lady comes on and tells you how to get there.

Oh, I mean the nice lady in the gps, not the back up co-pilot. She's nice enough, but being the back-up copilot/navigator is not one of her more favoured time killers.

I just have to mention that, as pretty darned nice as the car is, whoever ordered the thing didn't quite know his ass from a hole in the ground, since the gps is not the edition that actually has a map.....*sigh*

We even went to the Audi dealer in Hengelo on Saturday to confirm that in fact, we got ripped off. Ok well, I realise that we're not living in the Congo (and why would I?) but honestly....the Ma'am got LOST coming home from work the other night. The whole map thing is really important.

So when we go to Belgium on Tuesday, one of our passengers will be bringing along his Tom-Tom since, in a similar fashion to my portable (and somewhat inexpensive) gps that I have back home, it has a map, so you can actually see where you are!

This....

nice lady, decided to add to the fun of the day by organising the filing folder (should be a cabinet, but we left that one in Canada)

To her credit, she did clean it all up.

I haven't had to try and find anything just yet, so the system hasn't been put to the test. Some of the items we simply don't know what to do with, since we always suspect that at some point, we'll need some snippit of information that's been sent to us by one of the utilities or whatever, and we'll be screwed. Everything's in dutch of course, so sometimes I'm not completely sure what's what.

We had been back from Puerto Rico for a few years and STILL had documents that we had been tenaciously hanging on to.

Pretty sure we pitched all that stuff out by now.

Now, since today was going to be lasagna day, we became painfully aware that the bakery had not been on our list this morning.

Um...there's never really a list ok? and that's part of the problem.

First of all, I need to point out that there is absolutely nothing open on Sundays....except gas stations. Some of them do have a little variety store type of deal going on, but it depends where you are. However, here in Delden there is a bakery that is open for half a day on Sundays, and I didn't even make it there.

So what that meant was, it was time for a visit to the bread vending machine.

No, I'm not kidding.

I even included photograhic evidence.......

I ponied up the €2,oo for the buns that are in the spot four from the bottom...

The amazing thing is, they are fresh. I guess there's very little tolerance for such a thing as stale bread.