Today, I went looking for the post office, to pick up a letter, which turned out to be a payment for something from Warsaw, Poland, which was kind of ironic, because I had just mailed a set of prints to an unrelated person in Warsaw an hour before, which, granted that is the sum total of my commerce with Warsaw in the last year, sort of amusingly fell on the same day.

However, I hadn’t been to the local post office before, since we just moved. I got there eventually, but finding it was an experience.

I did the thing where you get on a road and start trying to figure out numbers, and get panicked, and then suddenly the road switches and you’re on EAST Whatever Road, and the numbers are going in the opposite direction and then you cross a road you absolutely know you shouldn’t be crossing, and so you turn around in a parking lot and go the other way, and find yourself back to Whatever Road, and so you must have overshot it, so you turn around again, but you can only find a residential street to turn on, and then it’s lined with cars like the Death Gauntlet, so you wind up going halfway to New Jersey before you find a spot you can get the car turned around in. (Did I mention that for some reason there was a hundred pounds of cow manure in the trunk? There was.)

But lo! What is this? I turned around yet again, in the parking lot of the vitamin store, and managed to crawl into the parking lot of something that looked promising. A big brick official-looking building, big seal out front with an eagle on it–yeah! That must be it!

And that, boys and girls, is how Ursula visited the Mexican Consulate.

(I eventually located the post office in back of a grocery store, claimed my letter, and slunk out again. Who even knew we had a Mexican Consulate in Raleigh?)