August 31
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
For the last day of August, back to the purge. No sweets. Not a one. The rest of the enormous chocolate bag, well, the primary bulk of it, had been chucked off to the kids. As usual, Collette heard a ‘yeah right’ ring in the back of her head. She had her tricks to keep away the sweets… but she wondered how long it was going to work…
Meanwhile, Collette had noticed Rose’s reading list, (e.g. Amazon wishlist), was raging with an impressive stew of materials as usual:
-
Journals of Captain Cook
-
Arabian Sands
-
The Great Book of Couscous
-
Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit
-
The Arabian Nights (three volumes)
-
Little Women
-
The Annals of Imperial Rome
-
Plutarch’s Lives (two volumes)
-
The Memorable Things of Socrates
-
The Annals: The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero
-
Riverdance — Live from Radio City (DVD)
-
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Mark Twain)
-
The Search for the Giant Squid: The Biology and Mythology of the World’s Most Elusive Sea Creature
-
various selections by Gordon Ramsay
-
Opals
-
The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth (H.G. Wells)
…and on and on and on…
By ten o’clock, Mom had arrived with Francis and Linnea-Irish for math and Portuguese. And Mom and Puck played roll-the-duct-tape-down-the-driveway while Puck snacked on red-skinned Spanish peanuts.
Francis took a ride on the Ruckus after working on math and discussing the perfect days for storms with Collette, which always started off with sun, picked up wind in the afternoon, and brought in the storm in the late afternoon. He also told Collette about Sunday night.
“We played Predator at youth group,” he said. “I knocked Creole down pretty hard and choked him. Well, not really on purpose. But he was spitting up things afterwards. I told him after Henri talked to us in the lesson about showing affection for one another, that that was my way of showing affection for him. He didn’t mind.”
And Mom shared how Aunt Tuuli had ruptured two discs in her back over the weekend, had surgery, and would still be in good shape for their vacation to China in three weeks.
Then Collette added a truckload of goodies into the van for Linnea, from times past, including, but not limited to: a well-preserved eighteen year-old Egyptian heiroglyphics set, a quill pen and ink set, her old glass chess set, hardly-used rollerblades, Great-Grandma Combs’ winter coat from the 1950’s, and a large quantity of the old beanie babies from the Magnus-Mollie days for the little neighbor girls.
And Collette seemed to have injured her knee again… somehow. Sometimes these things happened without her knowing it. Perhaps from all of those Tauntaun rides she had been giving Puck the last two days…
In the afternoon, Puck wrote up thank you notes for his Sunday School teachers. And there was tuna for dinner. There was nothing more ‘blah’ than tuna.
And OLeif was back to the grind of seminary, albeit only one class: Counseling.
Collette spent her evening with typing, sermons, the BBC, and… the last of the dark chocolate.
In casualties of the day…
The fifty-year-old rose-colored chair, one of the set Grandma had given OLeif and Collette… had popped a spring.
And Puck had shattered his piggy bank, quite by accident.