Selling Papes

 

Mom was out for a while getting costumes, and put something together for Maddie's character at tomorrow's KidPak service.  She's a "newsie," a source of information for Sherlock Holmes, and in fact one of his famous Baker Street Irregulars.  The costume looks great!  I made this role up for Maddie so she could be a newsie, something she's been into of course since watching the musical and even singing that song "Seize the Day."

There's our snowman!  He's still there, although now he has a rubber chicken head!  He will easily be still standing tomorrow, and that makes a whole week that this pile of snow has been standing here.  Pretty impressive for down here in Georgia.  Snow doesn't stick around that long, typically. 

We had on endless cooking shows, because that seems to keep Nana calm.  Mom was out shopping for a time, and that wasn't good for Nana, who can't go anywhere currently because it's pretty cold out there and she's still been under the weather.  So we did our best.  But it's been rough.

One interesting moment came when I was taking some material down to the basement.  I saw a black widow in the house, underneath a stack of mats we had brought in from the garage.  I was shocked - and didn't kill it outright.  I captured it in a glass jar with the idea of showing Mom, and just making sure it was in fact a black widow.  But under closer inspection, we discovered it wasn't a black widow.  There was no tell-tale red hourglass marking underneath, or any red at all.  In fact, the spider had the same shape, but was actually a dark brown with some spotty markings of a lighter brown on the back.  We looked it up online and discovered this spider was actually a false black widow.  I've never seen or heard of such a thing before.  We're confident of our identification, and reading more about this spider, we've discovered that they're not aggressive and additionally, they actually are known to attack and eat real black widows.  So they're what king snakes are to copperheads.  Anyway... ya' learn something every day, right?

Okay, let's see... what else happened today... oh yeah, we finished one cat jigsaw puzzle.  Maddie and I labored on this one for a good while, a 500-piece puzzle that took a good portion of the day.  It helped with the cooking shows playing on television.  Maddie finished it up all on her own, and just like that, we're ready for another one soon.

But tonight we had to get to bed early.  We've got an earlier morning tomorrow!  We read tonight from "The Syndrome," and after that said our prayers.  I had some lines to memorize, and soon enough I was off to sleep.