24 JAN 26

While Puck is down at the fort beginning his second full day of Reception and all its random atrocities...

Yali is full-pirate in the morning... it's an all-out drag-down slice-out one-man sword fight against himself with his saber and his aunt's fencing foil walking the back deck of the living room couch in full gear and a cross pendant around his neck to blasting Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack... somehow also eating a cream cheese bagel for breakfast...

Patience is casually interested in joining this chaos but isn't yet fully convinced... “If you join” Yali coaxes... “I will give you some of these doubloons” **holds up package of Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies**...

The day is biting... it's brutal... arctic ice wind pushing in from the west... yet somehow in that hands-numb-within-thirty-seconds-of-stepping-into-negative-eight-windchill... we've got some extremely confused daffodil greens pushing up out of the earth...

At noon Yali is scooped out the door in his green velvet elvish cape... "The Fellowship of the Ring" is re-releasing which means three-plus hours with Pops and a bucket of popcorn in an almost-empty movie theater... pirates and elves all in one day is the good life for Yali...

And Patience finds her own adventures that late afternoon with Nana and cousin R and baking her own “doubloons” out in St. Charles County...

Oxbear and Yali return with a pumped-up Yali... so pumped he flies in for a hug... “IT WAS SO GOOD!”... before he and Oxbear spin west for a dinner of meatball subs with Cub Scout friends...

And I shoot south to Pevely for Dominos and episodes of “The Middle” with a few of the siblings and mostly light conversation on current events...