January 17

A blue morning, but the mist seemed to have receded a great deal in the night.

At church, Collette and Puck helped play with the few other children in the nursery during the first worship service. Puck enjoyed rummaging through the plastic shopping cart. He would pull out a piece of plastic food, examine it, name it, and hand it to the little girl assistant, who then repeated him.
“Egg!”
“Egg!”
“Ice ‘crean’ cone!”
“Ice ‘crean’ cone!”
“Plant!”
“Plant!”
The ‘plant’ was actually lettuce, but what did a two year-old care about that?

Back at the house, Joe was prepared to leave for Rolla for the day. But not before he showed Collette and Puck his new Blue-Ray Planet Earth, which opened with a scene of jungle over high cliffs.
“Venezuela?” Collette wondered aloud.
And she just so happened to be right.
It was a collection of amazing footage.

And after Puck was put down for his nap for the afternoon, Collette drove back out to Wentzville to pick up OLeif from his seminar.

When returned, it was the middle of the afternoon, and Mom was preparing a pot of her special macaroni and cheese, and Gouda sausages.
Puck helped Carrie skin carrots and chop broccoli and cauliflower, which made him feel very important.
And, Rose… brought up a bag of garbage (or supposed garbage) from the basement, where she was (as had the other Snicketts girls before her) reorganizing the basement… once again.
“What!” Collette cried.
She hurried over to the garbage bag where Rose had just set it down by the wood burning stove.
“What’s this doing in here?”
She pulled the skeleton of her first violin from the garbage bag.
“It’s broken,” said Rose, tossing the first piece of garbage into the fire.
“Is not. And it’s worth a couple of hundred dollars!”
Rose shrugged, “It’s broken.”
But still, Collette had saved her first violin from the jaws of flame. And she put it away for future use.

Dinner conversation centered around the pros and cons of sending a group of high schoolers to Mexico on a mission trip… mostly cons, the previous mission trip to New Orleans for clean-up efforts (which included several eleven and twelve year-olds)…
This was shortly later interrupted by Dad…
“Adel,” he said, as he did after almost every meal. “Any -D-E-S-E-R-T?”
“I think you mean D-E-S-S-E-R-T,” Mom replied.
Engineers could never spell, apparently.
And then Mom mentioned her idea to have a movie night as a fundraiser for the mission trip that summer.
“I wonder how we get permission to have a public viewing of that,” she said.
“You could call the FBI,” said OLeif.
“Otherwise you’ll be spending time in federal prison,” said Dad.
“And then you’ll never see any D-E-S-S-E-R-T again,” said OLeif.

After Carrie mixed up the fudge, she brought out her box of maté teas, with which she was experimenting with various mixes.
“Who’s ready for a crossover maté?” she asked.
“I’m ready for a crossover!” Puck announced, marching into the kitchen, trailing two helium-filled balloons in his wake.
And OLeif and Collette discussed the various teas and their flavors, as Carrie began her next enterprise.

Meanwhile, Dad was already impatient about the fudge.
“How long is this going to take?” he asked, ten minutes after Carrie had put the pan in the fridge.
“Two hours,” Carrie told him.
“Two hours!”
Dad poked his head inside the fridge. “Oh, it’s done!”

Then the refrigerator began its usual alien sputterings.
“Whoa,” said OLeif. “That’s weird…”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Carrie. “It used to make sounds like, ‘Whoop! Whooooop-whooooop-whooooop!'”
“Like an alien spacecraft,” said Collette.
“Like it was about to take off,” said Rose.
“And Dad still hasn’t replaced it after 24 years,” said Carrie. “I wish it would just die. Dad has a special attachment to his old appliances…”

That night, OLeif and Collette enjoyed pomegranate juice and chocolate peanut butter cups over The Golden Globes. Well, OLeif did until nine o’clock. And he was out.