January 26th, 2025

Patience chooses the squeaky pew at the morning service... she and Yali rock back and forth in it for awhile to test it... too squeaky even for them... we move up a row before the organ prelude... Patience tapping her cheetah shoes against the tiled floor during readings from the Book of Titus... at the end of the service the vicar announces the dumpling dinner this Saturday at our Chinese church (who meet down the hall in the gym)... Patience wiggles her eyebrows up and down at this news... “Can we go?” she whispers...

One of the older gentlemen who usually shares a table with us during Bible study chats with us about how he's never, in about all his 90 years, seen snow last this long on the ground before... over three weeks now... though I inexplicably saw daffodil stalks pushing up through the ice only yesterday...

After church... Global Market stop... frozen packs of big steamed pork buns and Japanese ramune sodas for Puck, and some other goodies shared around the van, including something new for me : a small dense cheese-and-sweet-potato cake (good)...

Early in the afternoon Patience walks up quietly to ask... “Mom, is Eggo a Christian?”... big old dumb eyes yellow mutt looks up trustingly at her... “Well, dogs don't really work like that, but they're all God's creatures...” Patience ponders this and concludes pleasantly... “So she is... in a way...”

Puck leaves for another four-hour shift at work at two o'clock with a bottle of caffeine pills when needed, since he's not a coffee man, randomly wondering aloud what would happen to a rhino if it got into the whole bottle...

As tungsten weights arrive from Amazon for Yali's pinewood derby car, Oxbear and I drive Yali and Patience to “brown park” as we creatively call it in Wildwood for a brief run-around in the snow where only one other family is present due to the cold...

“Bad behavior is one of the few privileges of old age.”

– Hector MacDonald (“Monarch of the Glen”)