This is a joke that my mother and I have with each other: Because I can’t drive to the store (no licenses for the legally blind) and I get tired of calling a taxi for every little thing, I order a lot of stuff on the internet.  Delivery has gotten super-fast and you can usually get free shipping if you try.  Even if you can’t, it’s still cheaper to ship than to pay for a taxi.  So the UPS guy knows me really well.  He actually saw me walking home from work one day, turned the truck around, and pulled over to give me a package that had just arrived.  If for some random reason he’s reading this blog, thanks UPS guy!  That was really cool.

Probably the most annoying part of all this, other than endlessly signing those “Please leave at the door” slips, is the number of boxes I end up with.  Our apartment building won’t let us throw boxes down the trash chute and we only have a dumpster outside the building on Monday evenings, and it’s a tiny dumpster.  So I inevitably end up with this big pile of boxes and no way to get rid of them.  Why not cut them up, put them in garbage bags, and put them down the trash chute that way, you ask?  All perfectly legal, all management-sanctioned, all a really bad idea.  I can’t cut up most of the boxes with scissors, so I would have to use a box-cutter, and after the incident where I accidentally stabbed myself in the wrist and had to spend a week explaining to the people I work with that I wasn’t attempting suicide, I decided that was not a viable option.

Hence my joke with my mother.  Every time she visits, I put her to work knocking down the boxes with a box-cutter and putting them in garbage bags so we can put them down the trash chute.  We end up with bags of boxes, and of course we get boxes of bags to put the boxes in, and after a while we started making up a song that goes, “Bags of boxes and boxes of bags.”  That’s it, really, lyrics-wise.  We think it’s hilarious.  We dance around while we sing it.  What brought this to mind was the unfortunate run-in I had with my current pile of boxes this morning.  My mother hasn’t visited in a while and there’s been a bit of a pile-up, so to speak.  I wasn’t paying enough attention to where I was going and knocked into the pile.  The boxes came crashing down around me–I thought I was being attacked at first, they all went for my head–and when they settled, the boxes literally came up almost waist-high.

Mom is coming to visit next weekend.  I think I may have to take her car keys before she sees the pile of boxes waiting to be put into bags.  But if they decide to attack her, at least she’ll have the box-cutter to defend herself with.