A lovely Saturday

Quick, contact ASCAP! Yamaarashi-chan is singing Puff, The Magic Dragon, and I'm damn sure she hasn't paid her license for it this week!

One of the things I forgot to blog about yesterday is that I burned my left foot, badly. When we had been grilling the salmon, I had taken the lid off the grill and put it on the ground, then accidentally brushed up against it with the side of my foot. This morning, when I ran to the dry cleaners to drop off our winter bedclothes for preparation and storage, I stopped by the drugstore to pick up bandages after Omaha mentioned we were out. So many to choose from! I must have wasted ten minutes just trying to find a plain ol' set of inch-wide strips. I did find some nice blister management patches, which are working really well on the burn.

After a quiet morning where I got to do some meditative housekeeping, changing the bedsheets and mopping the floors (I like housekeeping; there's something pleasant about knowing you're making your house into a home, keeping yourself and your family clean and healthy), Omaha assembled peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for the family and we headed out to Oloteas for a day of sun, swimming, and pagan ritual. Yay, pagan rituals! There were so many wonderful people there, I've lost count of them: shemayazi, damiana_swan, Leith, Kaeli, hermesinbattle, and I'm sure the Goddess knows many, many more that I'm spacing on right now.

While I was swimming, I kicked off the side of the pool and my right leg seized up in a terrible spasm that rippled all the way up my body to the small of back. The pain was excrutiating, and I must have panicked some people the way I surfaced, screaming. But I managed to get to shallow water and stand, massaging the leg. I had a terrible limp for the rest of the day, although I found that it was mostly up-and-down motions that bothered it. I had no trouble spinning the girls dizzy. They climbed trees and

A good picture of Yamaarashi-chan
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climbed around the small mound next to the swimming pool, having as much fun as children can. I like this picture of Yamaarashi-chan; it makes her look a bit like her older sister.

Somehow, I got roped into helping make the salad for the potluck, mostly by providing a rhythmic motion with my right hand (working the salt and pepper grinders). Apparently, someone thought I had experience. The food was absolutely delicious, although

The picnic at Oloteas
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most of the girls didn't seem to agree. They ate mostly the fruit, a bit of the rice, and then dove into the cookies.

I wanted to go to the ritual, but it started late and one of the children was having an exhaustion meltdown (not Kouryou or Yamaarashi, though), so I had to sit out with her and a few others and watch from a distance. They were fine; they let me write this post.

To Pride!

Omaha is meta-psychic. She claims she knows what I'm thinking if she could read my mind. Usually, she's right about that, too.

Today is Omaha and my 16th anniversary, official, since we were married in 1989. Both of us were oddly crabby this morning, and seemed somewhat forgetful, although, we've booked a weekend two weeks from now where we'll have time to ourselves, so we didn't make a big deal about it today. Instead, we did routine things, like make oatmeal for the girls, and clean up our digital lives, and stuff like that. And then we headed off to the Seattle Pride Parade.

I have mixed feelings about the parade, but I'll just give the rundown. We got there shortly before noon, but I had to park so far away from my family that it wasn't until about 1:00pm that I caught up with them. They were sitting by Roy street, while yet another gay & lesbian martial arts group ("Quantum Martial Arts", oh my gods, how trite can it get?) went by. Square dancers, librarians, gay &

Kouryou-chan gets ice-cream to cool down.
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lesbian pet owners, a socialist running for city council ("Rent control! Minority quotas! Disarm the police!"), gay & lesbian Latinos (and will someone please explain to me why a lesbian would get breast implants?), anti-war groups, anti-Bush groups, Democrats (but wait, I repeat myself), and groups so poorly labeled I wasn't sure what they represented. Finally the BiNet group walked by with Yamaarashi's mother, mother's girlfriend, and sister wandered by. Omaha, Kouryou-chan, and Yamaarashi-chan all joined them, leaving me to play the traditional role as pack-Elf, picking up all the supplies (two fold-up chairs, two picnic blankets, water supply) and carrying them up to the park for the Festival.

The Festival was lively, despite the cool, grey clouds overhead. There were a lot of pretty people there, some wearing almost nothing, a few down to sheer underwear. And I've become convinced of one thing: there are just too damn many people wearing Utilikilts. It's a privelege, not a right, people. I'm not buying one. If I'm going to wear a kilt, it's going to be wool, it's going to be honest. I'll probably buy from North Channel if I can afford it.

I'm tempted to go to the "Screw Abstinence!" party later this month.

We stopped to have lunch. The girls ate corndogs, and I had a mad cow taco. We ran into tygereclipse

Tygereclipse!
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, Nurse Ratchet, and eventually even fallenpegasus. While I was waiting in line for my taco, I heard the couple behind me discussing "that new Johnny Depp movie," as the shorter one put it. "Oh, you mean Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?" said the other. "Yeah. Isn't that a remake of something?" said the first. Oy.

Afterward, we wandered down to the families area and let the kids watch the

Bubbles!
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big "Bubbleguy" show, where this guy who obviously does the Santa routine showed how to use just about any household item as a bubble wand, making huge swath of bubbles that looked vaguely Lovecraftian but the girls loved every second of it. Eventually, it became time to go home.

I was fortunate; I caught a bus going by the park that went right back up along the parade route and dropped me off about eight blocks from the car. On the bus, I saw one of those classic "WTF?" couples: big guy, very heavyset, poorly dressed, and his utterly, unfathomably hot Chinese girlfriend.

I grabbed the car, drove back to pick up the girls, and headed home. We're all exhausted, a little sunburned, a lot burned out.