Ehlana and Ethan:
Happy 26th Birthday, Joshua Parker!
Cassie and Michael helped their friend with having a special day, but we only offered best wishes while at church; and had our own adventures for the rest of our day. The top local news is the return of summer-hot weather with a high that topped triple digits for a few hours – though not quite soon-enough to have a heat-shortened church service. Tai Chi was by the river; Ethan and I helped with the cooking and cleaning around the food fun with Mom and Dad; and then our time at church and Sunday school included prep work for the holiday weekend service that the teens will lead next Sunday. By the time we came home, we had plans for a bike ride to Quarry Lake, so we got changed, packed a picnic lunch and other day camp gear; and met up with a gang of family and friends for the bike ride to our favorite local campground. Thanks to the upcoming holiday weekend, Quarry Lake has a lot of campers staying for the week on vacation and the hot weather brought out a lot of day campers; so we didn’t even try to do as much this afternoon as usual to avoid line-ups for favorite activities. We did have fun with a lot of water play; shared some of the fun with next-gen cousins and other kids that were brought out by parents or other adults to get a little break from the heat too; and then we eventually biked home in time for dinner. Some of our gang were going on to the Inn for one of the buffets after we got back, but Ethan and I had another quiet meal with Mom and Dad. We traded campground stories; the teens in the house pretended not to sense how much Dad still loves quality time with Mom in a swimsuit; and we were glad that there weren’t any jokes today about Michael getting Cassie and Mom mixed up because he wasn’t there today at all while busy with Joshua’s birthday celebration and some of his nieces and nephews. We all pitched in for the clean-up; did some work in the office that was again mostly related to disaster relief in Venezuela; and then it was bath or Jacuzzi time for at least three of us – and we’ll again pretend that we don’t know that Dad lost all ability to concentrate on his own work and went to ‘help’ Mom with her Jacuzzi break! That is definitely too much info for their kids; so let’s wrap this up with the world news update.
Peace was definitely off this weekend, but we expect regular flip-flops on that as long as insiders can continue to front-run the markets and make hundreds of millions of dollars on the wild price fluctuations. That’s very cynical, but there really doesn’t seem to be many leaders that care about what is actually happening around the world – whether the disasters are natural or man-made. No, Ethan, I am not being sexist – there are no woman-made disasters because we can always find at least one man to blame things on! He was only thinking that, but I couldn’t resist commenting too.
Moving along, there have been more exchanges of missiles and drones between Iran and the United States; the fighting in Lebanon continues; and none of this surprises us when we didn’t expect the peace deal to work at all with so many forces working to undermine and destroy it. The Ukraine war continues to be ugly too; and there have been some terrible stories coming out about how badly the Ukrainian soldiers are being treated by their commanders – including reports of deaths in training camps; lack of basic food and supplies on the front lines; and the horrific tactics being used by the press gangs to kidnap – draft – new recruits.
While all of that is going on, most western countries have leaders and media focusing on trivial or idiotic stories to distract the masses from reality. Okay, that isn’t totally true, since there are some serious issues getting attention too – like the heat wave in Europe and the Venezuela earthquakes, but there are all of those pointless distractions too; and we mostly mention that because we are stuck wasting a certain amount of time every day sifting through the trash to get to the truth for the news that actually matters. A lot of people joke about having A.I. take over for reporters and politicians, but if they’d let Mom program all of those digital leaders and media personalities; we’re not totally opposed to the concept! ;^)
Okay, we are obviously getting too-tired to continue this report; so that’s all for tonight and the weekend. We have a very busy week ahead leading up to the holiday fun; so we definitely want to rest up while we can to be ready for all of those adventures.
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!
