Even if a parcel isn’t yours, it’s still exciting. This was brought home to me last night when I came home to discover that Jeff’s brother Daniel’s banjo had arrived (they wouldn’t ship to Australia, so we are acting as middle-people). I knew that banjos were kind of big, but this parcel was ridiculously big, and it is so funny that it arrived in the week we were doing this topic!

I have included Mr Squirrel in the frame to give an idea of scale. Impressive!

We opened the box to check that it was okay and the banjo box itself was lovely…

But back-track a second….how rad was the banjo shop’s use of stamps?!?! Here’s a close-up:

Bless whoever had the job of counting those to make sure the amount was correct!

…in other postal-related news, our postie (not called that here I’m sure) has a key to our apartment building and unlocks the whole front of all of our letter boxes to put our mail inside each one! Jeff has made firm friends with the lady at the post office and she gives him lots of advice to make things cheaper to send (e.g. cut the corners off wrapping paper so it doesn’t overlap so much). We sent my parent’s (heavy) christmas presents via seamail on December 15th and they arrived this week (almost three months)!

Last night I received my first JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) newsletter and a hand-written letter thanking me for joining! Very sweet!

Written on special JA paper and everything…

Parcels aren’t dead! Long live parcels!