16 FEB 26

It's a school holiday so Yali is busy conducting intense research for his Spiderman costume embellishments while Patience prepares scrambled eggs for them both... Yali cleans his plate but finds himself still hungry... sensing that he might get another plate if he tries a little winning of friends and influencing people... turns to his sister... “You know how to make those eggs again Patience?” // Patience who is not familiar with potential compliments regarding her cooking from her brothers immediately sits up a little straighter asking tentatively... “Yes?” // “Good... make another one...” **stuffs the empty plate towards her**... Patience is glittering in the glory of such praise and confirms... “You want it with more raw bread?” // “Yes! Raw bread!”... which is their way of specifying bread that is un-toasted... and just to add a little insurance to his request Yali continues... “I feel like I just had the best breakfast ever!”...

This remarkable camaraderie of a sort continues throughout the morning... that is until lunch is served...

This time Yali has taken the last roll of raw bread to dunk in his chicken noodle soup... Patience asks to split the bread with him... Yali agrees... Patience splits it in half and takes half... Yali is mad... he is so mad that... “JESUS IS PROBABLY MAD AT YOU PATIENCE!”... Patience is unmoved... Yali continues the boil for awhile adding exclamations such as... “You know what Mom? Just DONATE HER!”... which eventually reduces to a simmer as he turns back to the cooling soup mumbling to himself... “But I think Jesus is still disappointed in Patience for taking a HUGE chunk of my bread by tearing off a piece of it”...

But Yali is also abundantly busy with hours of Spiderman research and experimentation... taking notes from Youtube tutorials on the best way to create web fluid involving ingredients such as styrofoam and acetone which is such a potent smell that Oxbear who is busy wrapping another video call in the basement pauses to sniff the air... “Well I should go now... Yali's experimenting with stuff and I think I smell acetone”...

Some time later... including a break at the park on sun-warmed earth under encroaching late winter cloud... Yali has successfully created his intended webbing and bottled it in some kind of old relish jar...

And then... it's time to catch a mouse... trapped him under the old curiosity cabinet before we left for the park... and upon return Oxbear has some time to join for the hunt and capture... a relic Puck's cat must have stashed under the couch in the night and forgotten about... and the trembling fur ball apparently seeing his chance to escape is now tearing back and forth across the living room while Yali follows behind with a glass coffee carafe... Patience mostly helps by standing on the couch and screaming... several minutes later Yali successfully traps the tiny beast... and names him Lemon...

For the next hour or so great effort is made by both Yali and Patience to release the creature back into the wild... he isn't interested... after they've fed it some cheese they finally convince him out of his shelter and he zips up to the top of the honeysuckle bush by the mailbox where he remains suspended on a clump of thin twigs for some time until Yali later checks on him and returns with the declaration that... “Lemon has gone off on his big adventure!”...