The Pavlovian response to the UPS truck...and damn the packing peanuts!!

For any of you out there who are married or about to be married, you're probably familiar with the automatic physical repsonse that is generated by the low, gutteral sound made by a UPS truck cruising up to your house. Kenny and I are visited by the UPS truck about once every two days now, and we've actually gotten to the point where we can hear the truck coming from down the street. Every night, around 7pm, I see the dog perk his ears up, raise his hackles (he doesn't care what Brown can do for him, he hates Brown) and generally go ape-shit at the front door.
Let me digress here, and tell you a bit about Nathan (the dog) and his relationship with all things brown. Nathan, being raised by one of the paler people on the planet (me), is not used to people whose skin is anything darker than slightly tanned. So at his first sight of someone not caucasian, he absolutly flipped out. He's always had this reaction, and as embarrasing as it is for me, I can't seem to break him of it. So imagine when the UPS truck pulls up, and Nathan sees a huge brown truck, out of which comes a guy wearing ALL BROWN carrying a brown package. Into Nathan's territory, no less. Mayhem ensues, as you can imagine.
So we return to the story, with the UPS truck detected in the vicinity. Seconds later, we hear it: the low rumble of an engine, the squeak of stressed shocks. I come running out of the kitchen and announce to Kenny that the UPS truck is on its way. We run to the door, grab the package, and take it to the kitchen table. We've gotten to the point now where we recognize where the gift was purchased based on the address on the shipping box (the stores usually don't put the name of the actual store on the label). If it's Picastaway, New Jersey, it's Tiffany. If it's anywhere else, its Williams-Sonoma. I can't believe we actually know these things. We were teased last week, because a box arrived from Picastaway, New Jersey. Kenny sees the address and exclaims, "It's from Picastaway! It's Tiffany!" We opened it up only to find that it was a gift I had ordered for a member of the wedding party. Oh, the disappointment.
I think that the UPS guy has become so familiar with our house that he's actually having his UPS buddies meet him there to hang out. The other night, I came out from the back of the house to find Nathan going absolutely nuts at the front window. I looked outside to see two UPS trucks backed up against one another, with the drivers switching, literally tossing, packages between the trucks. It was like some sort of bizarre UPS mating dance. I had to go out and ask them to move because they were blocking the driveway. But hey, why shouldn't he block the driveway? He probably feels like the 20-foot area in front of my house is as much his turf as it is mine. We'll certainly have to leave a gift for this guy at the end of all of this. Afterall, he probably fears for his life with each delivery because of my ferocious welsh corgie mutt dog who, let me reiterate, really hates brown.
We've had a blast receiving gifts from the registry. I probably shouldn't make this comparison, but it's like everyday is Christmas for the past month! Or maybe more appropriately, it's like 28 days of Chanukah.
The only down side to all of this is that Kenny is a tree hugger, and I am a converted tree hugger, so neither of us can bring ourselves to throw the packing peanuts away in the garbage. As of today, we have three garbage bags full of packing peanuts sitting in our dining room. Eventually we'll figure out where to take them. Someone made the suggestion of taking them into the Williams Sonoma at the mall, shoving them across the counter, and saying, "Here. Take your freaking peanuts back!" That would be really funny, I think. I'll let you know how that one goes over. If that doesn't work, there's always the burning option. When I described the packing peanut dilemma to Carol, who works with me at Cantey Hanger, she offered to burn the packing peanuts. Carol lives out in what is best described as "the country" and apparently is a pyromaniac. Maybe not a true pyromaniac, but from what I hear, there's lots of burning that goes on out at her property. In fact, that topic has come up at least three times in the past week. Carol did mention one caveat to her peanut burning offer, which was that she couldn't do it on a windy day lest packing peanuts get blown all over the pasture, at which point the cows would eat them. I don't know, that seems like an acceptable packing peanut disposal solution to me. I don't know how Carol's cows would feel about it. Of course, I could also ask Jacque, our receptionist, to let her goats go at the peanuts as well. Writing that last sentence has caused me to ask myself why so many people at my law firm own farm animals? Anyway...burning the packing peanuts or feeding them to farm animals seems to defeat the purpose of an environmentally friendly disposal. Maybe I'll just let that offer sit, and thank Carol for her thoughtfulness and pyromaniac tendencies.
Given the current packing peanut situation, the day I dread is the day Michael C. Fina delivers all of our registry items that are currently on hold, all at once, complete with packing peanuts. Fina has this wonderful registry option that allows you to keep everything on hold at their store so that you can receive it all at once, rather than in pieces. Considering that most of our registry is located at Fina, that's going to be one very big delivery. We'll be breaking down boxes and dealing with packing peanuts for weeks! That might not have been such a good idea, in retrospect. Maybe one day I'll send all of Fina's packing peanuts back to them.