Ehlana and Ethan:
Happy 14th Anniversary, Rob and Trish Johnson!
We wouldn’t have been helping with that celebration even if we’d been home today, but we hope that their families and friends are helping to make her day special! While on that thought, we rarely mention the In-law families for the Johnson clan, but Trish does have a family too; and yes, they do actually spend time with them fairly-frequently too.
Family was part of our adventures today – Uncle Mark’s family. As a reminder, pretty much all of the adult members of his family are doctors including one Psychologist and one medical researcher; so they all still worked at least part of today – even if that was only doing rounds and a few appointments before being able to spend time with us later today. The three older teens all have summer jobs too; so we only spent extra time with Julian Everett and Noel McKinley. Kellum and Colleen McKinley and Noah Everett joined us – and their parents and grandparents – for dinner and an evening sightseeing cruise; and that was a highlight of our fun for today too.
Cassie and Michael had some work meetings today too, and we went along for one of them and took care of some chores for two more that included getting laundry done and getting ready for the flight home on Thursday. The play time with Julian and Noel included some quality time on a beach and in the water, and while a mid-seventies high seems cool to us compared to home; it was sunny all day; and that was enough to make sure that everything we did outdoors was comfortable. Dinner was on the waterfront ahead of that cruise; the views from the water of the islands, city, and Pacific sunset were spectacular. Naomi wants me to mention that she would like Colleen and Noel more if they hadn’t liked Ethan quite so much, but while Kellum looked at us as too-young for that sort of thing; Julian and Noah liked Naomi, Sophia, and I a lot too. For the record, Colleen liked Aaron quite a lot too; and I am going to keep pretending that both girls liked Aiden quite a lot too – especially since they also love his parents’ bakery! Moving along, after the cruise, we came back to our hotel without the Everett clan; the teens in our group went for a swim and a follow-up snack break that Cassie and Michael joined us for after dealing with some work; and now we’re winding down toward nap time paired up for some quality co-ed cuddle and teen chat time.
While we’ve been having a blast here, at home it was hot with another triple-digit high and sun most of the time except for a quick blast of a thunderstorm that rolled through fast and was gone. We know that it didn’t get in the way of the normal Tuesday baseball and Pizzeria pizza picnic dinner at the park; Brianna has reported to us that some of our cousins and friends went canoeing and then decided not to go all the way to the whirlpool because of the heat; and they returned home and had a lazy afternoon in and near the river or indoors when they wanted to cool down. We are looking forward to being home again on Thursday; and we are trying not to feel insulted about Brianna being disappointed that Cassie and Michael won’t be home right away with us. We haven’t mentioned that, but they have a college friends’ wedding this weekend – for Vic and Chloe; so they’ll be going there from our home airport while Mom will be picking us up at the airport. She will have help and another driver for that to handle all of our luggage and six teens; and Mom will have fresh luggage for Cassie and Michael so they’ll have formal wear for the wedding. We’ll have more on that on Thursday, but that’s all we have for our story today; so we’ll get to the world news and then move on to nap time soon.
Let’s begin this world news update with the latest earthquake disaster – this one in Colombia. As with Venezuela, a lot of buildings collapsed; the death toll and injuries totals continue to rise; and the earthquake also set off one of the volcanoes and that added to the danger and chaos. We aren’t personally helping with getting aid through our charities to the region, but Mom and Cassie are. We also want to add that this creates new challenges for our charities because they were already being used in the region to get help to Venezuela; there is still a lot of need there; and now we need even more for the people of Colombia.
We wish that our world leaders would think more about the real challenges we have without the wars that are so pointless, but they don’t do that and won’t change; so nothing changes for the better in the Middle East or Ukraine. Peace is still off for Iran, but war isn’t on there yet either; so the rhetoric and threats battles continue while the ‘smaller’ atrocities continue in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. The Ukraine war continues at the same high level of front lines fighting and missile and drone exchanges that are far more-damaging for Ukraine due to the lack of air defenses. Their leaders – and people – should be terrified about what the coming winter, and while three or four more months might seem like a long time away when every day is a horror; it will be much worse come winter with no heat or electricity or fuel or food – especially for the troops on wherever the front lines will be by November or December. The outcome of that war is inevitable unless even-worse options happen like expanding the war into the rest of Europe; so we continue to assert that taking a bad deal now will be better for Ukraine than fighting on to total defeat.
As usual, we’ve had enough of the bad news, and the co-ed cuddle time will be happier; so we’re out of here and back to that last blast of quiet fun with our favorite cuddle buddies and best friends.
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!
