Better days


We had a more pleasant day today, with less yelling. The girls read books quietly this morning until breakfast, rather than lose their minds on the iPad, and then we set off as a family to fetch the coloured markers we’d left behind at the last house we stayed in.
Well, we meant to do that, but then La Serpiente began acting out, so it was just me and Destroyer. We walked over and she asked me to explain electricity and magnetism to her, and on the way back we talked about fire, explosions in custard factories and other stuff like that. When I have something interesting for Destroyer, she loves listening. And it’s not even ponies and unicorns.

In the afternoon I was doing outreach with the homeless down in South Seattle. Today somebody suggested picking up pizzas from Costco; an 18" pizza is only $10, so that’s quite an efficient way to feed people. Unfortunately, if you make the mistake that I did of ordering two half-cheese, half-pepperoni pizzas that’s probably much slower than requesting one cheese and one pepperoni, because the production line is optimised to pump out lots of pizzas with a single topping. And wow, is it a production line. There’s even a metal frame they use to cut each pizza into regular segments, instead of using a pizza cutter and judgment.

I took the pizzas over, fed people, dropped off some laundry, filled up some gas canisters, had an old coot driving an enormous truck the wrong side of the road almost go into me, and then drove to Fremont, intent on getting a doughnut for dinner. (I’d had another two-meal day, and figured I should reward myself for daytime abstinence.)

There were no doughnuts at the PCC in Fremont, to my great sadness. I got chocolate chip cookies for everyone and a scone for me and drove home.

The kids had been good all day. Pretty much up until we gave them the cookies (refined sugar and its side effects, anyone?) but only a short bit of shouting before I put them to bed. Then two games of Blood Bowl to try to move my win rate up a bit (a defeat and a victory, so that’s better than the average to date) and so to bed.


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