Hauling Food Again

[liralen]

We spent the morning eating cinnamon rolls and then Jet and I ran off to Hobby Lobby to get more book materials. *laughter*

We're mildly obsessed.

We bought some elastic for closing the books, thin ribbon for a bookmark if we want to add them, multicolored thread for sewing the books together, and some candles for the beeswax for waxing the thread. I bought a few more needles for the class, so that everyone who wanted to sew could.

Then we found out that the scrapbooking section of the store was having a 50% off sale on *all* decorative paper. Oops.



I got another huge pad of decorative paper, acid and lingin free, and Jet picked some of the 8.5x11 papers as well. We got some really pretty stuff, and all for a lot less than we would otherwise get it for. So we'll be able to make a ton of books, perhaps for Christmas, perhaps for the class. We'll see.

From there we headed home, and played a bit of Kingdom Hearts II, just enough to get killed. Yeesh. Lunch was during the half hour we could spend, and then we all piled into the van and headed to the Community Food Bank, and loaded up. Jet helped me, a lot, with soup and chili cans to put into boxes. They needed pop top soup and chili with no condensed soups so that folks could just heat them and eat them even without a can opener. So Jet and I dug and fought rolling cans in slanted bins. I got bit by a can hitting another can and started bleeding all over the place until Jet noticed and told me to take care of it before going on.

Jet and John loaded sandwich bread into boxes while I dug for canned carrots. Lots of canned carrots.

We ended up with over 900 pounds of food, including the limit of 10 turkeys. John and I had bought nine turkeys in the last week for the OUR Center, as the local grocery stores have them on sale for ridiculous prices. The Center gives them to families so that they can have their own turkey dinner for Thanksgiving. You're probably thinking, how can the homeless cook a turkey? Well, a lot of the families have an apartment or stay in a week rent hotel room kind of thing and pay rent when they can, so they have a place to be and a place to cook their dinner. Which is a step up the path to not being homeless anymore, but they still need help keeping themselves together.

Maybe I should be writing from that amazing font of what it's like to be homeless and how close so many people are to being there...

Morgan Spurlock, who did the movie Super Size Me is doing a TV series called "30 Days" and in one of the episodes he and his wife try to live on minimum wage jobs, and they figured out that even if they could make ends meet on a regular basis, it just took one of them getting ill and the other getting mildly injured to make it really hard to get things to work.

From there we hit the recycling center, and then home. Jet and I finished plying the yarn we'd spun on a spindle together. Jet spun the spindle while I did the drafting. I Navajo plied the singles and Jet now has two ounces of really gorgeous yarn that's all kinds of colors. I think every length of it has at least three colors in it. I'll get to see how my rovings work out, too, both the ocean one and the autumn one (reds, golds, oranges, greens and browns).

I finally cracked a bit before dinner, as between John's stuff and Jet's stuff I hadn't had a moment alone all day. They went off to help a neighbor with their Christmas nights, even the dad of the family refers to their house as the house you can see from space. *laughter* So I had, supposedly, a few minutes to read The Bourne Identity. But John and I discussed dinner, and even with something as simple as fish sticks, I had to go to the grocery store for some fries and some vegetables to go with them. *sigh* So I had about five minutes of reading and then ran off to get Stuff.

And I was pretty angry. Between today and yesterday I've been running pretty much full time.

But the trip calmed me down enough to cope. The boys agreed that I could have some alone time before dinner, and I went and took a shower as I desperately needed it. Then we had dinner and John ran off to his meeting, and Jet and I played Kingdom Hearts II enough for me to be really happy with how the plot and characters are going. Really, really happy. Now I have to get the first game...

We're not done, yet, but I really like the characters and how they choose to do what they do. So many people equate video games with violence or mindless sitting around, but, for me at least, they're about choices and the consequence of choices, along with how to keep taking the next step even if one fails the first couple of times, especially with Jet and I both playing together. He gets to make the decisions of what to do and when, and he takes a lot of pride in that.

After we got past a certain plot point, we saved, turned everything off and I took him over to the neighbor's house and he cheerfully played with the kids there while I ran off to class.

I didn't want to go to class. I really wanted to just stay at home and spin or something, but I decided I had made a promise to myself and them that I would participate when I could. I realized, just today, that, besides the teacher, I'm the only one who hasn't missed a class. Though folks have had excellent reasons for not making it, I realized that I just have made the time. It's been good. I also know that I'm going to miss in April, when John and I go to Back Bay to help rebuild houses. So I have no reason to just do a perfect record for its own sake. But it's been interesting seeing how much of a commitment I've made for myself for this study.

The boys have decided that I get tomorrow afternoon for myself. Period. I'm looking forward to that and getting further with one of my stories.