Lazy Saturday...

Well, Saturday rolled around and after a frantic morning of quick feeding and getting into motion, I drove up to fallenpegasus's place to help him move to his new apartment. jezel showed up in this huge Home Despot truck and we moved two loads of furniture. One dresser apparently didn't want to move; despite being in the bottom of the pickup well it leapt out at a traffic stop and shattered itself into its component particleboard parts. Pegasus and I had to run like Steve Austin back a block to clear the road.

Then it was time to hurtle back to Burien to... take a nap. Oy. After being up late the night before (Omaha was working on Kouryou-chan's costume and I finished Doom 3 in the meantime), I was tired and just fell asleep while reading The Risen Empire, which turns out to be a mixed read all the same-- lapses in science and philosophy mar what is otherwise a pretty damned good read, but the book is the first in a "series" (no telling how long), has no resolution, and there's no warning about that on the cover. The cover, in fact, implies that the book completes at least one plot, but of the three plotlines running through the story, not one is resolved when the book comes to an end.

Then I got the kids dressed to go to ivolucien's place for a Halloween party. It was a lovely party, all told; Yamaarashi-chan went as the monster from Scream, and Kouryou-chan went as Sugar from The Little Snow Fairy, an anime of which she's fond. Ivo, of course, had a kid's corner with paper and clay and markers and scissors, all good. There were some very lovely costumes-- I went as myself, I'm afraid; I'm as suited to fancy dress a snowman in summer-- and some lovelier people. I felt out of joint, though; I knew few people and my agoraphobia was kicking in hard.

Later, I got the kids home and put them to bed. It was too late to give them a bath, so I'll have to give them one Sunday morning.

Amused by Sunday...

So, Sunday has been quiet. I woke up late and worried about it until I realized that I had an hour extra in which to reset all of my clocks. Then I had plenty of time to rise and make waffles-- the good kind,with oil and butter and eggs and vanilla and stuff. I wish I'd remembered to use khamut flour for just that little bit of extra goodness.

I bathed the girls-- we'd gotten home too late last night for them to have their baths then-- and then let them run loose in the house for a while. I cleaned up the kitchen, did the dishes and ran a load of laundry, then watched Drawn Together on my laptop with the headphones. It wasn't as funny as the preview. There were moments of squirm-in-my-seat unfunniness. I'm glad the kids can't program the TiVo yet.

Omaha came home, tired from her overnight with her friends, and I made the girls lunch, just tuna for Yamaarashi-chan and peanut butter for Kouryou-chan.

Afterwards, we kicked the girls outside, hopefully long enough for them to get some sun. I think Seattlites become vitamin-D deprived in wintertime. I sat down and finally geeked for a while, doing some OKCupid stuff, doing about 50 more questions and getting up to 93% profiled. Alarmingly enough, jezel floated to the top of the match list. Well, perhaps alarming is the wrong word. Hmm...

You expect me to swallow that?

Not shrill. Annoyed. This isn't about the election.

The Washington Post has an article in today's edition entitled "Got flu? Blame the free market." The article talks about flu shortages and so forth and so on.

Then it says, "There are three reasons why the market has failed: product liability laws, government regulation of vaccine production facilities, and finally the slim profit margins in an unreliable market."

Say what? Okay, there are viable arguments for product liability laws and government regulation of vaccine production, but for Thoth's sake, if you going to cite those, don't call it a free market, because it ain't. It's a regulated market. It has drags on it that aren't dictated by the needs of the buyers and sellers. And 36,000 Americans will die this year because that not-free market "failed" us this time around.

Trick or Treat...

I took Kouryou-chan and Yamaarahi-chan out for Halloween. Yamaarashi-chan's costume was not too scary for Kouryou-chan to look at directly, so I took the girls out while Omaha stayed home and made dinner and manned the front door. Because of our flag property at the end of a dead end road, we never get any kids and we didn't get any this year.

But the girls went over to the burbclave and walked up and down, running into a few other kids: a catgirl, a ninja, a ninja turtle, a witch. They each got their pumpkins full of candy (man, whoever came up with those things must have made a fortune on them), and we got to meet all the neighbors. Much fun.

The only sour spot of the night was this teenager, about sixteen or so, all in black, driving around the street at dangerously high speeds on a gas-motor scooter, with no protection on. The scooter was loud and he was clearly a danger to himself and others. Moron. Kouryou-chan got cold enough she put on her coat, which obscured much of her costume. The girls kept explaining each other's costumes to whomever came to the door, and once or twice I had to remind Yamaarashi-chan that not everybody wants to hear all twenty-six episodes of Kouryou-chan's favorite TV show, not summarized, as a way of explaining why her sister is wearing a pink wig.