Card Sharps and Poison

So Friday, after I get home, Omaha and I decide that we're both a little too burned out to make dinner, so we eat leftovers instead. It proves to be an excellent idea. The kids gleefully glommed down the remains of the pasta and sauce from Monday, while I had some of the leftover salmon and she had the chicken.

Afterwards, we played cards with the kids for a while, the kiddie variant of "Go Fish," with fish painted on the cards. Kouryou-chan didn't get the idea, but Yamaarashi-chan quickly figured out how to play, although she also had a nasty tendency to cheat, trying to peek at other people's cards, lying about what kinds of cards she had, and concealing the complete collections she had. That's creativity of a sort.

I read to the kids and put them to bed. They've both been pretty good all week.

Today, we stayed home to do chores and go blackberry picking. We were supposed to go to Pasturedance, but the event fell on a weekend where we were just too burned out to go out and the nasty morning weather convinced us to stay home and plan out our replacement of the retaining wall.

We mananged to pick a quart and a half of blackberries before I noticed that my arm itched like crazy. It didn't take me more than a few seconds to realize that I'd brushed up against poison oak. I quickly ran home and put lotion on it. Fortunately, it was my bravehardy adventurousness that led to the irritation; no one else caught it, and the first aid manual says that the calamine lotion should keep it under control until it subsides, in about four hours.

Time to clean up the office.