Calm Before the Storm
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Over at the house…
Things were moving toward Friday’s departure.
While Collette began gathering passports and hotel confirmations, Puck saw a decorative arrangement of dried orange slices on the coffee table, and subsequently thought that he would take a bite.
Then he and Francis amused themselves with a set of slides printed in St. Louis, of photographs from around the world, from 1952. Including reproductions of The Seven Wonders of the World.
And later, Linnea placed the squirming bundle of Snuggles into Puck’s arms. Puck tried to hold on to him, and practically died of giggling.
The day continued onwards with registering OLeif for spring class, Linnea researching the human lung for a paper, Puck digging through a giant bag of pretzels, and Rose catching up on Stephen Fry’s travels in America.
In the afternoon…
A quick trip to Target for black sweatpants and freeze-dried bananas for Carrie.
Francis was anxiously awaiting the arrival of Linnea’s new cellphone. He was always excited about new gadgets.
And Rose was busy preparing, as the first phase of her cleaning of the entire basement and garage, to ship old textbooks off to Amazon. Her collected income had already risen to over three hundred dollars.
The rest of the day was a quick succession of paperwork for the trip, application paperwork, and last-minute collections and packing.
Dinner…
Toasted ravioli, while Rose, with wood clothespins to clip up her hair, showed them old films she had discovered from her old video camera, including ridiculous plays, one of them entitled Poison Snow.
And Puck showed off his bottle of glow-in-the-dark paint that Rose had gifted him.
Off to church for the evening.
When they arrived, Francis carried Puck into the building still strapped inside his car seat.
“Oh, the prince!” Sinai declared. “All hail, Prince Puck!”
Then Francis, in his usual habit, set Puck sideways, still on his seat, on the floor.
“Oh!” Sinai exclaimed. “You could be beheaded for that!”
Children’s Choir started with a bit of an explosion. Poor little girl in the circle just couldn’t quite take the excitement of her first evening in the group, or dinner hadn’t settle well, one of the two. But after having been returned home for the evening, she recovered herself to normal. And the evening proceeded as originally planned with a Jonah theme — crafts of party blowers affixed to blue foam whales that, when blown, tossed out ‘paper Jonah’. Goldfish crackers. Blue paper fish scavenger hunt. Jonah storybook. Jonah Veggie Tales…
Meanwhile, Francis entertained any passerby in the sanctuary with his remote helicopter.
As they left that evening, the snow was already beginning to fall. The roads were slippy as Francis drove them home. And it was suddenly looking like a treacherous morning journey out to Hannibal to pick up Cherry at the half-way point the following day.