Bo Peep Blog

Last year, I took my daughter to NYC for a week (you can read about it here) and at the time, the husband was thinking of taking the boy to Mexico to visit his parents.  My in-laws go every year for 8+ weeks, and we’ve been to visit them twice over the years.  Quel hardship, I know.  In any case, the husband checked his passport and it had expired!  He also checked the boy’s, but it still had some time on it.  Off the application went to Passport Canada, clear across the country.  Six weeks later, a package arrived – it was his application back – he’d forgotten to enter his height and weight.  Why this oversight couldn’t be rectified with a phone call (cheaper, faster, etc) is beyond me, but then I’m the only bureaucracy around here.  He filled it out, sent it away and then another six weeks later, got his new passport back.  By this time, it was April, and the in-laws had returned to Canada.  He threw it in the passport drawer and forgot all about it.  In the process of all of this, of course, he also forgot about the boy’s.

When my in-laws were at our house for Christmas, they asked us a few times if we were all okay for passports.  I knew that mine and the girl’s were okay, since we had just renewed them for travel.  The husband knew his was okay…and nobody checked on the boy’s.

So on Thursday night, we opened the passport drawer just to make sure and lo and behold, the boy’s expired in April.  Of 2011.

There are 5 Passport Offices in BC – all quite close to the border – and none are anywhere near us.  After a quick phone call, we determined that we could get the boy a new passport in a day, which requires a flight to Vancouver.  Flying direct from our little airport is always choice #1; it’s usually reasonable when I book in advance.  And therein lies the rub.  Booking a flight from anywhere to anywhere with 4 days’ notice is going to cost you in this province – $639 and change will get me a flight.  A few dollars in SkyTrain tickets, plus hot chocolate at Mink and hopefully Cocoanymph (can I time this any better?  The Hot Chocolate festival is on!) and a lot of money for a last-minute passport is the cost of our stupidity.

Lesson learned?  Put passport expiration dates in my smartphone.  Be grateful the husband is taking the blame for this one.

Cross your fingers for me – all the drafted Plan B’s seem to involve more money and/or plenty of swearing.  We can’t afford either as the girl charges us for bad words.

Now I ain’t no Pioneer Woman, but sometimes my life in the “north” of BC surprises even me.  Raised in the big city of Vancouver, I was pretty much your typical urban dweller – taking transit to school (what are those yellow buses for, anyway?), covering 50 houses or more in an hour while Trick or Treating, walking to corner stores – although I did love wilderness camping trips with my dad.  Outhouses have never bothered me.

So on my day off today, I worked on the girl’s Hallowe’en ninja costume and on editing pictures for the website while the husband took the kids off to the bush to collect firewood and possibly harvest some wildlife.  The husband, you see, has just about finished his Garage Mahal in the back of our 0.5 acre property – a 50×30 foot shop that makes all the subdivision husbands green with envy – and it is heated by both a gas furnace thingy mounted from the ceiling AND a wood fireplace.  Said wood fireplace requires many downed trees to feed its’ belly through the fall and winter, which is when the husband is most productive out there.

They all got home in time for dinner; we ate, played and then the kids went to bed.  I finished loading some sleepers onto the website and then we started talking about tomorrow (Sunday) and what needed doing.  The unloading of the firewood was first on the list and so I suggested we do it now.  At 10:30 on a Saturday night.  The husband commented on what a couple of wild ones we have turned out to be in our middle age.  I agreed and then proceeded to put on work clothes, boots and gloves and opened the shop door.

It’s probably not a vision I ever had of my life when I was younger – my future self bundled up against the chilly fall air, climbing in and out of the back of a pick up truck then creating taller and taller stacks of firewood – but oddly enough, it makes me pretty happy.  Plus I’m counting it as exercise in an otherwise sedentary day.  Happy late Saturday night to you.