draxil

Tonight is another meeting of my book group, which at this point has been running for twelve years at this point.

We're a bit inconsistent, since in twelve years we've read 59 books, but we have read at least one book every single year. Some of them were excellent, like Bunnicula, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed, The Devil in the White City, or The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and some of them were garbage, like Anno Dracula, The Secret, Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, or Supernova Era. We've read fiction and nonfiction, history and biography and science and political analysis, fantasy and sci-fi and historical fiction and drama, classics and books written within the last year, and all kinds of things in between. People have joined and left but the core group remains. redpikachu started it as a way to read more books and it's worked, at least for the books we've read.

We spend a lot of time also just talking about our lives, but I'm heartened after reading that Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing. Other than the wine on Shabbat, most of the drinking I do at all is when I pour a glass of wine, sit down at my computer, and fire up a Discord video chat. And I just remembered that we used to do Google Hangouts back when that was a realistic video call solution.

Here's to many more years.

It's what happens with school but it's also what happened with Laila on her visit to the grandparents this weekend. They kept her an extra day (through Monday at 10:30 a.m.), and she initially had some energy when she came home, but eventually fell asleep on the couch and later took a long nap in her room. I'm at the office today, but sashagee told me that Laila is also being cuddly and taking a nap today. We've kept her home from school both days, which I'm not happy about since she's been missing a lot of school lately, but when she has a fever of 38.3°C and snot is streaming from her nose and she just wants to sleep, we can't exactly send her to school. Hopefully she feels better tomorrow.

The rest of the weekend went much better, though. We were originally going to drive Laila out to the grandparents on Friday after work, give back their car (which we've had for a couple months now), but last week we were invited to a birthday party of one of Laila's classmates, so on Friday we lit the Shabbat candles and spent the night in:

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...and then Saturday morning we went out in the fortunately not-raining weather to the Lincoln Park Zoo and wandered a bit until we found the birthday boy. This took some doing, because none of us--including the birthday family--knew that the zoo was having a Spooky Family Event, so there were hundreds of people around in costume, tables of zoo employees passing out candy, carnival rides, the works. We went from exhibit to exhibit, watching the lions who were out sunning themselves in the unseasonably-warm weather, the kids went into a big bouncy obstacle course, they ran all around the children's garden, and we rode the train for a bit when the party was over. Laila hung back a bit, but she wasn't the only kid who did, so I didn't feel too bad. Some of those kids definitely had a ton of energy.

We drove out to the suburbs, dropped off the car and Laila, went out to a lunch date--I got the poke, sashagee got a brie burger--got some dessert and then hopped on the train. All of that meant we got home close to 5 p.m., almost in time for the party we were going to, so I finished up my exercise while sashagee sat down for a bit, we packed up the grandma's potato soup that we were bringing, and called a Lyft to head to spacedragon's soup party!

This all started from a Discord thread that spiraled out into dozens of soup jokes and memes, and eventually spiraled out into a bunch of people wanting to eat soup. We arrived a little later after the initial soup consumption, but there was still some lentil soup (made by confuciousdragon) and vegan arroz caldo (made by become_unglu3d--the chicken version had already been eaten) as well as French bread and tomato soup bread (think zucchini bread but tomato soup based), so I took a bunch of lentil soup and bread and stood around the kitchen table chatting with people about Witch Watch and soup. Despite being full, a bunch of people came back to sample sashagee's grandma's potato soup (potatoes, milk, carrots, green onions), and we ended up staying until midnight when everyone finally ran out of energy and went home.

The next day sashagee wasn't feeling well, so other than a quick shopping trip out to the Middle Eastern Grocery Store to restock on pita and halvah and pickles we didn't do anything. And then Monday, Laila came back sick. And so we come full circle.

Alright, workday's over, time to pick up the last CSA box of the year.

One benefit of Laila having a speech delay is that a lot of really cute toddler expressions that go away too fast (from a parents' perspective) have stuck around for longer. Here's a list of them at this point, so I don't forget them later:

• Tromise: What she says when she's telling us she won't do it (whatever "it" is) again. Upgrades to "Big Tromise" when she's trying to show us how serious she is. This is already fading away into "Promise"
• Princess Stuff: Sparkly gowns, high heels, tiaras, gloves, anything that she knows a princess would wear.
• Hold You: In most other circumstances she's got I/you down but this one lingers when she wants me to pick her up.
• Same same!: Any time two things are similar, usually accompanied by pointing at them and then crossing her arms and pointing at the opposite one.
• Big Giiiiiiiirl!: Always in a sing-song voice, whenever she does something she knows is a sign of getting older that she's proud of, like putting her clothes on by herself. She'll also use "Big girl" to describe anyone acting like a grownup--I got called a big girl for putting my shoes on myself.
• Cheese hangaburs: What she says when someone is taking a picture of her.
• Ah-bay: The alphabet.
• Peppersalts: Salt and pepper.
• Little Girl: There are three classifications of people--babies, little girls, and people who are elderly. A little girl is anyone from about age 6 to 45.
• Flamingos: "Mangos." Sometimes this becomes "Flamangos."
• Somegetti: Spaghetti.

What a cutey.