what? I'm harmless-looking. I am.

How, you might ask yourself, did I end up in the parking lot of the Tim Hortons in Coburg, holding a sign that read Don? and smiling like Miss America? I blame ebay.

See, spook bid on this funky-looking little cabinet, and then we won it. Despite its distressing minty-green paint job, we were excited. The owner wanted to meet us somewhere rather than having random ebay people showing up on his doorstep, and proposed the Hortons. He said he would email us again with directions.
We waited.
And waited.
And waited.
In the meantime, we rented a car and looked at maps to see if there was a nice place to take a walk in that general vicinity. Well, what I mean is, spook did. I am missing the part of my wiring that would allow me to understand a map. I nodded and smiled over the maps. Due to my over-careful reading of some parts of the information and my non-reading of other parts, we had planned to go to Colborne where ebay guy is actually located, and so our plans to go out to Sept-Iles were flummoxed when we discovered that we needed to be much farther west. We settled on Darlington. Don't laugh.
In case you're still tracking this, no, ebay guy had not emailed with said directions. Using the amazing power of the internet, we got our own damn directions to a Hortons in Coburg, and sent a few carefully worded emails. No response. At 11:00 on Monday morning, we sent one that read "Well, we're setting out now--hoping you haven't forgotten. We'll be at the Tim Hortons at the corner of X and Y at three-thirty."
As we walked down to get the car, spook said "Hey, I've got an idea--want to drive out to Coburg for donuts?" I concurred this was a fantastic plan for a date. We went.
Darlington provincial park is pretty nice, despite its proximity to the Nuclear Information Centre. (eeee.) We got our boots muddy and picked up pretty rocks on the beach, including one small piece of quartz that looks just like a jellybean. Then we drove out to Coburg, and settled ourselves to wait for the man known only as "Don."

It was like the most ill-conceived blind date ever. spook sat at a table with his cold hands wrapped around the token coffee we bought, and I jumped up and down like a little kid, running out to the parking lot to flash my Don? sign every time someone likely-looking pulled in. The drive-through is shockingly busy, so I kept getting psyched out by people who were only there to talk to the metal box. I was starting to wonder how long we should wait for our furniture-bearing suitor when spook said "I think that guy has a big green something in his truck." Yep, it was our man. We transferred the cabinet to our car under the wide-eyed gaze of Don's little kid, shook hands, and headed for home. Well, for Home Depot.

After our long drive, we were very restrained. There was, I confess, an orgy of paint-chip gathering, but we limited our purchases to a couple of strips of wood and some $0.49 dowels for my roman blind project. And some nylon cord. And a level and an L-square and a palm sander. Never mind.