Various logistics, good and bad

[mtbc]

With family arriving from the tropics, I had some grocery shopping to do, also some stocking of the car of things like warm coats. With ordering various items for them, bedding and whatnot, I also had plenty of recycling of packaging to do, and the communal trash had previously been overfull, causing me backlog. Last night, after work, I did the shopping then, with living in a top-floor flat, I found it worked well to put on a coat, carry recycling down, leave the coat in the car, then bring more groceries back up, ready to pick up another coat and more trash. Helpfully, there was a substantial piece of cardboard that worked well as a carrier, folded at the bottom, for packing smaller cardboard and whatnot into on the way back down, so that got disposed of on the last trip to the trash.

At one point, upon seeing the DPD van, I paused so that I could be sure to be present if a delivery was coming to me, but no. Of the various couriers bringing me items, the only problems have been with DPD, who seem variously dreadful. Perhaps it's partly a local issue but I'd be glad to know who the courier would be before ordering. Of course, my online ordering coincides poorly with the holiday gift-giving season and postal strikes.

Comments

[thewayne]

Has your family been to Scotland before? I just have this image in my mind like the Jamaican bobsled team arriving at the Canadian airport in Cool Runnings and seeing a blizzard for the first time. :-) Not that you're having blizzards right now.

[mtbc]

Haha, no, the cold (and early dark) was indeed quite a thing for them to experience, and here it's barely around freezing, so much warmer than what you'll soon experience there. At least, later on, they were snug under their duvets. They'd never seen snow before so I am glad we had some already for them.

[thewayne]

I had seen snow before I moved up here from the desert climes of Phoenix.  Before we married I came up for the winter, and my SUV wouldn't make it up the hill!  So we parked it down in Cloudcroft, and it got buried.   So we just left it there.  It wasn't AWD and didn't have snow tired and I wasn't in a rush to get home.  After we wed, we traded in my car for an AWD Toyota with acceptable ground clearance - and it was an almost snowless winter!  The next year - now the NEXT year we had a good snow year!  And in one year I got that Toyota stuck in pretty much every spot that my wife got stuck in her first several years up here!  And that was WITH snow tires!  It's been many years since I've gotten stuck: improvements in tire tech, I'm more careful and now recognize how I got stuck before.

[mtbc]

Once I drove a rented Toyota Highlander in a blizzard and it did well, back in Ohio I ended up indeed putting severe snow tires on a Subaru (so AWD) and we had a great old Mazda minivan with high ground clearance and 4WD, could even lock the center diff to climb up over snow. In my old RWD police car I used to have shovel, cat litter, blankets, old pairs of boots, etc., in the trunk, just in case. Here, I'll have to be careful if I drive into the Cairngorms, maybe when the next snow comes soon, to show off the pretty scenery (rather smaller than your mountains but nice nonetheless!).