Just a few things

The Prague contingent has gone back to their home, but they lost a set of keys somewhere in the process. I miss them. I liked living with Hana and Frank.
I luck out on in-laws: not everybody can say that their son-in-law, their dauighter-in-law, and their brothers-in-law are all golden.

Meanwhile, the grey bears bag consisted of four units of lettuce, two of broccoli, some onions, some celery hearts, some cute little carrots, and two portobello mushrooms. I guess I'm on a lettuce diet for the forseeable future, I used the mushrooms, carrots, onions, and celery to make a dish for the potluck at work today. I thought of making it with broccoli as well but I think I need to have something substantial to eat at home as well as all that lettuce.

I've been saying it for months, but I'm really getting Yanek into the army this weekend. There's no way of avoiding it now, and also, I have figured out what the last straw is, and it's a big one that I've been foreshadowing for a couple of chapters and didn't know it.  All the time my forebrain was going "what did Yanek do to piss his foster brother-lord off that much?" and discarding various behaviors as out of character or too slight for a guy I don't want to portray as a complete idiot, I was building and building this very thing.  So it's a done deal, and my Yanek is doomed.  For the time being.


( you may not want to subject yourself to the organ recital )

An emotional moment

One of our staff took the morning off so she could go to Moffett Field and bid the space shuttle goodbye. I thought "what a sweetly obsessive thing to do" and then . . .

Another staff person sayed her husband had just called and told her that the shuttle would be flying right over us in a few minutes.  I wasn't very excited: I figured it would be way up there in the sky and we wouldn't know it from the twenty or so planes that pass overhead every day.  I was wrong.  It was flying very low: it was huge: it was a whale and her baby in the sky, accompanied by an eel or something. It was amazingly close, like you could just touch the thing and fly away with it. The staff all whooped and hollered, and I cried, and, unfortunately, so did some of the babies . . . I guess between the size of the thing, and the noise that it made, and the noise us grownups made, it was just a bit scary.

One of our older toddlers was explaining it to his mom when she came by later.  It was a really big plane.  One of the newly-minted toddlers (that is, she was a baby three weeks ago), was still kind of moaning every time a plane flew over, the rest of the day.

On another front, we have over 75% penetration with conjunctivitis now, between the kids and staff who have gotten over it and the ones who have just got it.