Looks Like Snow

At least it did here locally yesterday afternoon. Very locally, like just my living room.

Yesterday about 4 pm I get a knock on my door, it's my friendly (and somewhat cold) UPS delivery guy with a box about half the size of my living room. Ahhhh the presents from the grandparents. Though large it was not heavy. After shoving the box into the middle of the floor space, I cut the box open. Inside were thousands of white packing peanuts. Great. I've never really liked packing peanuts all that much, it must be from the 11 years as an administrative assistant having to pack up crap to be sent out and ending up with packing peanuts all over my desk area on a regular basis. Now that I have progeny I despise packing peanuts. Adults see packing peanuts as a minor nusance to endure which ensures the packaged materials are safe and secure. Children see packing peanuts as an instant and not uncomfortably cold snow storm, the contents of the package is completly irrelavant when packing peanuts are present. (I took their unwrapped presents out of the box with them just 4 feet from me, they NEVER noticed.)

After a quick search through the Packing Peanuts From HELL I discovered that despite the size of the box, there was very little in the way of items needing packing to such extent. Much to the Little People's delight the box was mostly full of packing peanuts and within minutes of removing the packages from the box, my living room had 6 in deep snow drifts.

I know you must be thinking I'm just a horrible bitch for not letting the Little People have their snow storm, but you obviously have never had to clean up a styrofoam packing peanut snow storm. Sweeping makes them scatter, vacuuming is difficult as the small amount of air generated from the brushes in the vacuum cause them to scatter and for some reason some of them tend to be kind of staticy and stick to the broom, vacuum, furniture, pets or clothes. When packing peanuts are used for a snow storm many tend to get torn into tiny little staticy pieces that resist normal cleaning methods. Yesterday I picked up most of the peanuts by hand, then vacuumed very well to get up the tiny pieces and this morning I'm still looking at pieces of them on the floor. Insidious little bastards just hang on to furniture hiding until the floor is completly clean, I'll be finding these particle for the next three weeks.

In summary, packing peanuts are Satan's creation, the UPS store who packaged the presents in such a fucking huge box to use so many of these damn peanuts are obviously the Minions of Satan and the grandparents who sent the box of toys are Evil (but hey, they are my family I think I've covered the Evilness of them before). And the only people who are truly happy are the Little People, because despite me yelling at them and banishing them to their room while I shoveled out the living room, they still have presents and they did after all get their show storm.