February 3rd, 2025
Evil mini-fig laughter wafting from down the hall in the morning...
Patience enters our room... “The cat...!” yes... the “good” cat had used the hall bathroom rug as a litter box in the night... as the bad cat had used the top of my bedside bookshelf as a litter box the previous evening...
Up with another headache for me and one for Patience... weather has been funky as it will do in the winter here (always, really)...
Patience hustles downstairs before breakfast to let the dog out of her kennel... slippers slip on the tile stairs... falls halfway down before catching herself... out come the garden-themed Band-Aids...
Shortly later Yali comes to math class wearing sunglasses and a cardboard party hat from yesterday...
As they sit down to sheets and pencils, Patience is discussing panda bears and how cute they are... Yali looks at me in a kind of older brother “my little sister's crazy” disbelief... “What kind of daughter did you... order? What kind of daughter doesn't know that pandas are dangerous?”
74 degrees in the afternoon... kids scoot out the door into tepid sunshine with the dirt-crusted kiddie pool from two summers or so ago... “We're going for a swim!” Yali announces... this process of course requires them to come in and out the kitchen door about seventeen times before they finally have everything arranged the way they want it... which is apparently the kiddie pool on the front dead lawn with the garden hose like it's July...
They return indoors two hours later for Patience's online speech session... Yali uses this opportunity to add the saucer sled to his giant rubberband games... it's soon sliding along the living room floor as he hangs onto the rubberband... “WOOOOOO-HOOOOOO!”
Laundry and dishes and clearing clutter into the early hours of the evening...
Yali can now be observed in his most natural habitat wearing Puck's green-bean alien jumpsuit from summer camp seven years ago with Sharpied eyes on its mask and a green velvet cape with plastic Disneyland pirate sword... air battling monsters on the trampoline...
I sit out there with him for a short while with a copy of the Encyclopedia of Native Tribes of North America, 2nd edition... quick splash of apricot in a chilling sky...
As it gets dark... Puck emerges to deal with the trash, empty the kiddie pool, and discuss at length with me everything from ovens and ice makers to butter dishes and bath mats... seventeen... but he's really seventy...