How Days Happen
Monday, August 1, 2011
In which the list of things to do grows like any other Monday-list…
Puck had concerns that morning about his dad becoming a pastor after Collette had explained his grandpa’s devotional from I Timothy at breakfast.
“I don’t want Daddy to be a pastor, ’cause I love him too much.”
“What do you think a pastor does, Puck?”
“They speech, and I don’t like speech.”
He went on to tell her something about ‘scruffy old riff-raff’.
The morning began:
- noting that OLeif had put all of the groceries in the fridge from the previous evening, including the frozen fish, bananas, and cinnamon…
- email social worker
- renew library books
- Marco Polo: salt markets and assassins
- empty dish washer, dishes, sweep kitchen floor
- wrap electrical tape on ‘loptop’ charger cable from ‘Earnest nibbles’
- encouraging Puck to finish his breakfast oatmeal while he ‘looked up tornadoes’ in his ‘radar mirror’
- make the bed, empty hall bath trash
- calorie-intake calculators and life expectancy calculators: Collette: 104-107 years/Puck’s daily caloric intake needed: 1702 calories
- pay bills and shred voided checks, unneeded deposit slips
- fifteen minutes of sun
- research potential trip to St. Paul to see Garrison Keeler in September for Gloria, OLeif, and Curly
- update Puck’s Highlights calendar for August
- four year-old eschatology…
- “Why is God going to burn everything?”
- “It’s to make everything new again. Like sometimes in forests with all the trees, people will burn out all the old branches and leaves and bushes and grass around the trees, so the fresh, new grass can grow in all green and beautiful.”
- books, stickers, Bible, Sunday School papers, alphabet, numbers, words…
- outgoing mail
- start laundry while Puck jumped on the mini trampoline
- gorilla puzzle
- books
- Swai and mozzarella (the rubbery ‘chonks’ as Puck called them, only just as disgusting as Wal-Mart could make them)
- Once again, Puck tried to con his way out of his fishy lunch…
- “I’ll just feed them to the sink,” he said, with an enormous grin. “Because the sink is hungry.”
- Then he tried some further distractions…
- “Are your eyes squishy, Mama?”
- Two hours later… the plate was cleaned well enough to acceptable levels.
- Gift of the Sea on CD
- working out the new Scrivener program: character pages
- Quiet Hour: typing out mad storms of pages
- two more ‘unable to locate’ Louis Hamilton records in the Illinois archives
- books
- Puck and Wishbone episode: The Impawssible Dream
- books
- Puck’s twice-weekly bubble bath
- fry-up; first banana since winter
- two calls from Great Uncle Harry
- OLeif’s free Fresh Scripts t-shirt in the mail from Canada, with personalized note written in multi-colored metallic markers, on stationary designed to be folded into a paper airplane
- OLeif returned with a stack of Tasha Tudor books from the library.
- working through OLeif’s term paper and lecture of the evening
In previous matters…
Puck had wanted to make ice cream.
“Well, we can’t today,” Collette explained. “I don’t have any whipping cream.”
“Wuhl. I have cream and it didn’t get warm a single wink.”
And later…
“The time has come into my heart to take care of your wallet. Did you know that? The time. Has. Come.”
During Quiet Hour, Puck was busy asking what a slew of different words meant, and often giggling at their definition.
“What does… ‘krillax’… mean?”
“Relax?”
“No. Krillax.”
“Collapse?”
“Yeah! Krillax! What does Krillax mean?”
Following dinner…
“Mama? I’m not gonna wear robes in Heaven, alright?”
“Why don’t you want to wear them?”
“Because it’s just kind of strange.”
Reading about the shepherds leaving their flocks and campfires to see Jesus in the stable…
“That would be very hot to stomp out their fires with flip flops,” Puck said in deep thought.
And when Collette was putting him down for the night, he patted her cheek, gently.
“Sweet girl,” he said.
OLeif entered the kitchen, fists on hips.
“I want munches,” he demanded with a grumpy face.
So while OLeif brought out the studies and worked on work till 2:30 in the morning, he encouraged himself along with a Dairy Queen ice cream waffle bowl. Good moods, all around.
“[God] owns Infinity.”
– Hilary of Poitiers