It's The Thought That Counts

Saw this in the bottom of the open Pentagon City Mall parking garage: Disaster Refuge Area. It was sitting in front of a 2 foot square locked storage shed. Brilliant, eh?


But they thought of having one. That counts for something, right?

Just saying.

Saving It For Later?

I come home, open the fridge and see this empty plate with a tiny pizza crust on it.

Now, since I'm not home every minute of every day I don't know every detail of everything that goes on. But my fridge is a microcosm of daily life that tells strange half-stories: yogurt with the spoon left in, open cups with a swallow left at the bottom, dinner plates with unidentifiable contents, condiments that travel from shelf to shelf, leftovers in oversized containers.

These things mystify me almost as much as the motivations behind them. I'm not a particularly organized person -- except for the refrigerator. I like to see my food and know where and how much of it there is. I like for my food to stay in the kitchen. I like to put something down and know that it'll be there when I return for it (this never happens).

I've taken to buying food that nobody likes: strong flavors, stinky food. Olives and ginger and hot sauce; pickles and okra and smelly cheese; mushrooms and spinach and asparagus; sushi and kimchi and wasabi; garlic and onions and mole sauce and exotic fruit.

The Nodlings are catching up, however -- they are starting to like my stuff. Already the olives, pickles, okra, cheese, mushrooms, spinach, and even the mole sauce are "gone" by one or another of the cohort.

Pretty soon all that will be left is an empty plate with a crust on it. Oops, too late.

The Dump Is Fun?

My kids like the dump; I don't know why.

They compete with each other to see who gets to go with Dad whenever we have a big load to get rid of. Nod-girl won the toss this time. I use it as one-on-one time with the Nodlings, so it seems special to them. As anybody in a big family knows, one-on-one time is better than gold.

The dump is a fascinating place: there's lots of big machines; people going in all directions; and, er, interesting smells. Our dump is not the real dump, but a Waste Transfer Station, where they collect the trash in huge dumpsters and then truck it to the landfill.

They recently redesigned the place, making it wide open and easy to navigate. Instead of going to the covered "Big House" you now back up to railings that you pitch your stuff into the below giant dumpsters.

For really heavy stuff you have to get weighed on the way in and then again on the way out. With all this old deck wood in my truck I dumped an even ton (2000 lbs)!

I don't think they would have picked that up from my curb.

Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival #30

This week on Sunday Snippets, WBN presents All in the family: a jam-packed week of posts that cover the gamut of our Christian family, including the Saints, reuniting with our separated bretheren, field trips to great church architectures, some Shroud trivia, a dash of theology, and a rant against society's bias against big families.

• Upside Down Theology
• All Saints Are Family
• Anglicans Opt For Rome
• Sugar Coated Shroud
• National City Christian Church
  
• No Respect For Big Families
  

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Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival is a weekly opportunity to share your best posts with the wider Catholic blogging community. To participate, create a post highlighting posts that would be of interest to Catholics and link to the host blog at http://rannthisthat.blogspot.com. Go to the host blog and leave a comment giving a link to your post.

Hordes of Orcs Fun

More mindless (Free!) fun from MacHeist! Whee!