Ehlana and Ethan:
Happy 15th Birthday, Paige Spencer!
Our classmate and friend’s celebrations needed to happen around academic adventures and practices, and while Paige isn’t involved in football or cheer squad, a lot of her friends are; so her dinner party was only with a few friends and her family; and she was also still at the teen praise team practice at the church. Ethan and I helped out with the birthday fun when we could at school with a gift this morning and special treats at lunch, but that was it for us and we left it up to others to keep the fun going for Paige the rest of the day.
Ethan and I also had fun last night with the dinner and studying at Sophia’s house; the marching band practice; and our respective sleepovers with Naomi or Aiden. Ethan and Naomi had more fun than Aiden and I did, but no details need to be offered here; and we were all happy last night by the time we got to sleep. Magi-powered fatigue healing was an option this morning before our separate Tai Chi workouts; I’ll claim the better breakfast, since we had bakery treats and Ethan and Naomi had a ‘normal’ school day meal; and we met up for the walk to school with extra time for meeting up with Paige to deliver that gift to her before first classes. The birthday lunch was the entertainment highlight of the school day; our football and cheer squad practices went well and the weather was great for that with the high hitting seventy-seven; and then Mom hosted our dinner, study, and group Magi lesson break between those practices and the teen praise team practice that we moved on to at the church after that break.
We’re working on music for Thanksgiving and Christmas now; and we focused more on the Christmas music and musical; since we have a lot to learn for that show. The practices will continue to be a bit longer, but we still collected Silkie after the practice and went for a walk with Naomi and Aiden that was longer than needed to get them to their homes. That was a fun wind-down to our day, but we still had some work with Mom once home; caught up with more of her travel news; and then moved on to bath or Jacuzzi time for all of us. Ethan was done first and got the head start on our world news checks; we’ve pretty much finished with that now; and will go and get some sleep once I’m finished with writing this report. Before we get to those stories; let’s cover the Cassie and Michael news of the day.
Ethan and I haven’t gotten much news directly from Cassie and Michael today, but Mom did; and they are very busy right now and pushing hard to keep up with a tight schedule that includes a lot of driving with stops along the way that are practically cameo moments along the way. They continue to deal with daily rain with sunshine and heat and humidity between showers and thunderstorms, and while some of that rain time is while driving; they’ve been rained on at some of the stops too. Today they spent more of the day in Gungu, but continued east from there by evening local time; and they’ll be more than three-hundred miles further and in Kananga by sometime tomorrow. They’re still sleeping now, but will be up soon and on the road again while we sleep, and by the time we wake up; they’ll likely be in Kananga and working there for the rest of their Thursday.
While we’ve mostly had fun today and Cassie and Michael have been working hard and making their way across the DRC; the rest of the world continues to be in turmoil. Russian attacks on Ukraine intensified again after the drone swarms Ukraine directed at St. Petersburg; and the Kiev infrastructure continues to be degraded and destroyed while life just gets harder for the people. Peace talks continue, and Russia released an American prisoner, but while that gesture was political; the person released had been a mercenary fighting for Ukraine; so he deserved the conviction and sentence he was given by the Russian courts. Many people might not agree with us on that, but we have a personal problem with mercenaries fighting and killing people for money – and we think that’s true for all of the billionaires making money through the military-industrial complex. We still don’t believe that the peace talks for Ukraine will go anywhere because Ukraine and Europe won’t agree to anything that Russia demands; and Russia is not going to trust any deal with America when our leaders are proven liars and their deals are usually worthless.
There are not peace talks for the Middle East right now – just talk and threats for more war. The Saudi-Yemen fighting isn’t waiting for any elections, but we are still waiting to find out whether airstrikes on Iran will resume before or after the Israeli and American elections. The ‘when’ doesn’t really matter, but we can hope that cooler heads will prevail and there won’t be new escalations at all. No, that isn’t likely; so we’ll prepare to help where possible regardless of what our world leaders end up doing.
The protests and riots continue in Europe and beyond with no end in sight despite crackdowns including curfews and using the military in France while their President runs away from the crises he’s led the country to through his terrible policies and governance.
I’d really love to get started on a rant for all of the daily distraction stories that keep coming out or are rotated through the news cycles every few weeks or months, but it is getting late; and ranting about that won’t change anything as the divide and conquer strategies continue to work while we don’t understand how so many people continue to be fooled by all of the lies and cons used against them. That doesn’t work on us and we’re going to stay happy despite all of the challenges in the world; so we hope that your ‘now’ is better than ours and that we’ve helped to make that happen sometime in our near or distant future. That will happen in small ways for the rest of this week, so stay tuned to find out how; and we’ll get some sleep now to be ready for those adventures.
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!
