Pineapple Problems; or, Where's My *%&! Mail?

It's amazing how sometimes a seemingly small problem can become SO LARGE, and so fast.

Case in point:
MAIL

I've posted about the Map of Lost Mail. (Here's a refresher):

Our mail has seen Oman, Italy, Sicily, Spain, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia

Our mail does some great traveling, even while we are living life here in our 45 square mile exclusive gated community.

Mail service seems to have become even more inefficient since we got here. When you only have one small store for everything, you find yourself buying strange and bizarre combinations of products online. Salad dressing and laundry soap? Why not. Moisturizer and socks? Sure. Colored pipe cleaners and 1980s movies? Yes!!

We have a few of those things here, of course. But we don't have the things I want, so online shopping it is.

For the first year or so, mail was routed to a sorting facility in New York and then found its way to our FPO (Fleet Post Office). We cannot get our mail from the post office.

Did you catch that? You cannot pick up your own mail. I know people here don't bat at eye at this, but to me, it's ridiculous. It's OUR mail, but we cannot pick up mail from the US Post Office. Only specific people who have been through training can pick up the mail. The mail then goes to my work and finds its way to our mailbox.

By the way, I don't think most other military bases work this way (at least not the ones where my husband was stationed). As usual, GTMO wins the lottery for the weird and bizarre.

Sometime in the last year our mail started going through Chicago, and that's when the issues seemed to start.

It now takes a month to get a package that used to take 2 weeks. Christmas and birthday presents bought a month in advance didn't make it this year. Also, we waited two months for a part for our Jeep so it would pass inspection, just to find out that somewhere between GTMO and Chicago and who knows where (Oman? Saudi Arabia? Spain?), the part got sent back.

(The part is a windshield wiper motor. Unfortunately the 10 or so day-long GTMO rainy season of sorts hit this past week).

I find myself getting really upset and aggravated over the mail situation. It's hard to explain how this feels to someone who lives where you can go out to an auto store, craft store, grocery store, or even a quick shop on the corner for almost anything you want/need, or can order something online and have it at the door in a few days. I was hoping that living here would help foster patience. Instead of "Less is More" as my mantra, I find myself saying over and over again, "You Get What You Get and You Don't Pitch a Fit." And then of course, me being me, I pitch a fit.

The mail has never been very reliable here, but instead of finding myself accepting it, I am finding myself getting more and more agitated.

Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Yes and no.

It's a snowball effect, these GTMO problems. It starts with not getting a toiletry you wanted but could live without, and then you find yourself mad that you can't get your contact lens or glasses prescriptions filled here. Gas is expensive. You can't buy books here. The car is out of alignment and there is no machine on base (or at least one that works) to align a car here. It takes 45 minutes to an hour to order anything online, because there's this little internet issue. . .

I've been watering some mystery plants outside the secondary campus every other day with the water collected in the four dehumidifiers that suck gallons of water out of the air every day. When I got here, two large pots of plants were on the verge of death. Now I find this:









Not only is there a beautiful lily, but a pineapple! The kind you can eat!

It is considerably larger than the cute little ornamental pineapples that are growing all over my yard.

While watering all the various pineapples, it hit me this week: pineapples are like my GTMO problems. The school pineapple has been slowly growing, getting larger and larger every week, and is still nowhere near being ready to cut down. I need to look at my GTMO problems more like the ornamental ones----they are more abundant and seem to spring up overnight in weird places. In fact, they are everywhere. However, they are also manageable---I can either ignore then and let them die, or if I pay lots of attention to them, they multiply like rabbits.

(Make that banana rats).