11 DEC 25

House is still quiet early that morning... dog trots past... giant wad of sauce-less spaghetti hanging from her jaw... she likes her pig-slop treats...

It's a cold one... some snap as Puck later wakes to hit the pavement... sprinting between neighborhoods until his lungs hurt from the biting air...

After a couple hours of the books... and kids asking for things like upholstery thread and dish soap and rigati pasta...

I have to leave for a couple of errands... “Behave while I'm gone”... the predictable words tumble out...

Returning about ninety minutes later... there is surprisingly only one note of disturbance lingering during my absence... all the ghost-prints on the wall are crooked and/or upside-down... innocence claimed by all... naturally...

“Some poltergeist came through here earlier” Yali shrugs...

More productively however... Yali and Patience have also learned how to play Go Fish when Oxbear breaks between meetings...

And Yali... following a couple of nosebleeds probably from the mildly violent encounter with the trampoline yesterday... is now wrapped in his green velvet elvish cape twerking to the musical track “Concerning Hobbits”...

Some running around town through an ultra-light tapping of sleety snow winding through mansions and estates spangled in festive white lights...

...and we're all home again where Yali has pieced himself from scraps and things into full Caribbean pirate... fencing an invisible buccaneer of “the North Sea” and his bamboo fishing rod sword propped between the slats of a dinner table chair...