Ehlana and Ethan:
Happy 23rd Birthday, Gretchen Johnson!
We’re mentioning Gretchen’s special day because Cassie and Michael were at her birthday dinner and party tonight instead of at the Inn for game night. While we didn’t have any involvement in their friend’s special day; we’ll hope that she is happy and has had a great day with her family and friends.
Our day has been pretty good, but not that exciting. Tai Chi and breakfast with Mom and Dad was quiet, fun, and not newsworthy; our academic adventures continued to roll along with new lessons and assignments; and then we opted for lab or archives time after school because it was cold and damp out; and we wanted to stay warm and get some work done. We needed to be home on-time for dinner due to the game night plans, so we didn’t actually get a lot done because of that time limit; that meal with Mom and Dad was another nice break; we took care of the clean-up; and then we all headed for the Inn.
The games and fun with our family and friends was definitely the entertainment highlight of the day, but we also don’t have anything major to offer for game night stories. There were also no championships for our family; and even the goodbye hugs and kisses with Aiden and Naomi respectively were mild due to an audience at the Inn before we went home with our own families. Dad is in the city next week, so he needed to work in the office after we got home. We did a Magi lesson with Mom; all four of us got to work after that; and we helped out with time phases so that we could get a lot done – though it is still getting late because some of our work needed to be done in ‘real’ time with network accesses that we can’t use while in time phases.
Another late night isn’t scary for us or anything like that, but it is a bit different; and reminds us of how often Cassie did that as a tween and teen while working her part time job and continually working on learning new languages. We need to pay more attention to her warnings about using time phasing too-often during tween and early-teen years too due to the effects that can have on our physical development, but then Ethan might not mind if that helped him to keep up with Naomi’s growth spurts! I’ll also admit that we’re both grinning now at the thoughts we are having about getting one of us to time phase a lot while the other doesn’t – just to have some fun with all of our favorite people if one of us was full-grown while the other was still kid-sized! We won’t actually do that, but then Ethan will eventually be quite a bit taller than me anyway; and I’m not really interested in being giant twin by comparison even if that would be funny.
While we’re thinking about that sort of thing, I’ll mention that Naomi isn’t actually hitting her growth spurts ahead of us despite the five-month age advantage. The three of us have stayed fairly-close together recently; and Aiden is only about an inch behind us. That isn’t due to anything we’re doing to affect our growth rates – intentionally or otherwise. Yes, Naomi and I are on the same cycle, and I made that happen for us, but that was entirely because I know how well that worked out for Cassie and Rowen; and don’t have a problem with following good examples. Ethan does not want to offer any comments and wants me to move on, but again, for the record, that’s part of tween and teen life for girls, and if we can help future Magi girls with these stories; we need to do that – even if it makes the boys uncomfortable. As for the guys, don’t expect Ethan to offer the same sort of details for his personal, physical development since that won’t happen; and I won’t do that for him. I am tempted to suggest that Naomi might be willing to do that in her personal journals, but maybe that would be a bad idea for the guys while the girls would definitely find that sort of thing very entertaining! ;^)
Moving along, we worked in the office until twelve-thirty; the bedtime computing and twin chat has taken a while because we’ve needed to wind down as well as catch up on the latest world and regional news. The deep freeze for our area is now imminent; there apparently won’t be a blizzard to go along with it; and Cassie and Michael will only need to worry about the extreme cold being a potential issue for flights heading out of the area. All local future Magi will likely still be familiar with those winter issues, but for the record, extreme cold requires special de-icing for jets before they can safely get into the air; and that can seriously slow down the take-off process at the busier airports. We should likely also add in the problems that have been caused by the latest issue with the Boeing 737-Max jets, since those flight cancellations ripple through to other airlines, but we don’t really expect that to be an issue for Cassie and Michael for their trip; since they weren’t booked to be on one of those jets; and can’t be bumped out of their seats by other travelers.
As always, I’m tempted to offer a lengthy commentary on some of the world news stories, but we want to be happy as we head off to dreamland; and that would be tough to do if I spend much time on all of those worst stories. I will suggest that future readers should check out current events archives as well as history books that often revise truth and reality into the unrecognizable. Ethan also wants to note that our perspective is an issue too; since human history is replete with awful stories of the worst that people can be for the best or worst of reasons. That’s definitely true, but for one example of current events being different; I don’t know whether there are any historical examples when it comes to doing things like justifying destroying everything in the Gaza Strip because we – people – did the same thing during World War Two to cities like Dresden and Hiroshima. That’s right, future readers, there are leaders in our world that think that because our ancestors did evil in the past makes it perfectly okay to do evil now!
So much for my apparent non-effort to not get into that sort of thing, but honestly, I don’t know how anyone can keep up with the news of the day and not feel angry, sad, and more over the worst that our fellow humans can be to each other. Ethan really wishes that I’d stayed with happier thoughts, so I’ll wrap this up with our best happy thoughts – Naomi and Aiden! Happy dreams, Ethan! ;^)
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!