Early Summer Scenes

JUST ONE: Our solo sunflower bloomed this week. It's not big, and it's not strong (it falls over all of the time), but it is pretty.

While admiring the 'chocolate' sunflower, I couldn't help but feel a bit sad about my alien garden art standing next to it. Check out how the black paint on its eyes is flaking terribly.

I asked our resident artist (Annabelle) to see if she could do something about it.

She scraped off the bad black and simply used a Sharpie to make the statue look much sharper. It's *so* much better!

PUFFY: A few evenings ago, we were headed toward home under clear blue skies. However, to the south, we couldn't help but notice TOWERING clouds

They were cloaking Mt. Rainier entirely. In fact, it's obvious the mountain created the micro climate around it so that the clouds accumulated there. It was really pretty and really interesting.


TABLE TIME: This week, we made it a point to get back to some gaming. It seems like that pretty much stopped when the pandemic started. We played the easy and always fun UNO, the cute and competitive "Llamas Unleashed," and a looooong round of Zombie Fluxx (not as much fun as the other themed Fluxx games, in our humble opinions).

CANCELED: My morning Google calendar alerts have been like salt in a wound for months now. Every morning I have a notice about my upcoming events for the day, and every day it's fun stuff that's been canceled.

Tonight, CJ and Christian should have been seeing Ozzy Osbourne at the Tacoma Dome. And that's not a date that will be rescheduled. Ozzy has been diagnosed with Parkinson's, on top of a host of other ailments he already had. 

Today's COVID-19 casualty was the annual 7-11 day, where the store gives out free Slurpees on July 11.

They didn't want thousands of people streaming into their stores today, so no special Slurpee day. 

This photo was from 7-11 day back in 2012. 

I told the kids they would still get their annual treat, so Christian took them to a nearby 7-11 (with masks on, of course), and they got a socially distanced Slurpee. As the old jingle goes, "Oh thank heaven for 7-11."