February 2nd, 2025
After the kids slap peanut butter on a few Eggos... back out to church for the eight o'clock service...
The world has largely melted now... all that remains are snow packs in parking lots looking somewhat like small hills of very dirty cottage cheese...
It's only about ten-thirty and back home...
- Oxbear leaves for Target for a high quality magnesium supplement...
- Puck is ready for another slow carb plate : thinly sliced smoked pork steak and eggs, over easy...
- Yali and Patience run across the street to grab C for hours in the outdoors playing “Harry Potter” together... C, always a little warm-blooded, is already in shorts as the thermometer pops past 55... warm enough for popsicles apparently...
Three hours of playing later...
- Oxbear brings Yali to a Minecraft-dinosaur birthday party with a few Yellow Bird buddies...
- Puck leaves for a two o'clock work shift on no caffeine, which he hasn't attempted in awhile...
- And Patience and I drive out to the Big House where Mom is giving away old lamps and glass bowls and things from clearing out the basement... and there is discussion on topics covering radon gas, thyroid diseases, mathematics courses, opinions on immigration, adoption and discipline, Protestant vs. Eastern Orthodox beliefs/perspectives, and many other things while Patience helps “Grandma” paint butter onto oven-baked quesadillas, plays in the sandbox with the little cousins, piggybacks T around the yard, and Francis burns the old Christmas tree waiting in the fire pit...leave two hours later with a Ziploc of leftover quesadillas and a white glass hobnail lamp...
Home again... sitting around the back patio in a gray twilight in conversation with Oxbear while he watches a fleet of chickens in the smoker...
Puck stomps through the front door regretting the combination of caffeine-abstinence and slow-carb diet started on the same day... hits the breaks on slow-carb... one item at a time... he then more cheerfully places an order for Freddy's cheeseburgers and helps me sort out lightbulbs for the hobnail lamp in the kitchen...
And Yali is swinging wildly from the exercise band wrapped around Puck's pull-up bar in the kitchen doorway...