Yowza y’all are chatty. I’ve read all, and absorbed some. Hugs, condolences and congrats in turn.
Flyboy: good to have a clean kill on your drain problem and to learn it isn’t a sign of widespread drain line deterioration…$3K can be a mere downpayment on that replacement job were it necessary.
As to me …
On Sat the Elmo-themed 3yo birthday party was an adorable, if raucous, success. I got to meet 2 of the soon-to-be 3 new fosters. Another pair is waiting in the wings, to make an appearance in a couple weeks maybe. Lotta “maybe” in foster kids’ lives. We had daughter’s 5 kids du jour, plus a few guest kids and mommies.
Meanwhile four of the kidlets from our last holiday gathering (Easter?) have since moved on to “reunification” with some randomly selected semi-willing relative of dubious qualification for child-rearing. But better than their bio-parents who were manifestly unqualified to have kids. The revolving door of family crises in our county continues to spin like a windmill in a hurricane.
I’m on-call Sun-Fri. Late on Sat night after I’m asleep my phone makes the loud “Congrats, you’re going to work tomorrow and it isn’t overtime” noise. Oh bother.
Up at 5am, out at 6, and off to beautiful downtown Houston, where the heat is hotter, the bugs larger, and the humidity thicker than anything Miami can dish out. Everthang’s bigger 'n Tayxas!! Worse too, but that’s a rant for another thread.
At least we’re staying downtown and got there by 11 am local. Found a nearby food truck gathering so FO & I wandered a mile or so down the street to get whatever was to be had. We had several trucks to pick from although we abjured the CBD and THC truck. America be gettin’ weird.
I ended up with a shawarma-spiced lamb kebab in a gyro-like pita bread with some French fries tucked inside and an odd orange sauce that was like a spicy tzatziki. And a heaping pile of made-from scratch hummus I watched him prepare. All made by a happy Jamaican man with dreadlocks living in Texas. Whole lotta mixed cuisines & cultures going on here. Yaay!
FO had something from another truck called birria tacos which was sort of like a French Dip sandwich but served in flour tortillas and the au jus was spicy and full of floating veggies. The dipping sauce was almost a rich beef, vegetable, & peppers soup. Messy, delicious, & comes with a spoon to finish eating the sauce.
A third truck provided real milkshakes made from real ice cream. I should not have eaten that but it was good in the hot sun.
So we sat under a big tree in the grassy parkway next to a sidewalk and ate our feast, then waddled the mile home in the 95F/34C sticky heat. A fine and memorable repast that was huge enough to serve as today’s dinner too. Next came a brisk walk around the nearby thronged indoor fancy mall to cool off and work off some lunch. Back to the room a nap was mandatory. More due to overstuffed belly than need for sleep. Far too many carbs; I was afraid to pull a blood sample; might’ve broken my meter 
.
It’s been thunderbooming while I was sleeping and now as I’m Doping. Nothing major, just some rain & noise.
Bedtime is about a half-hour from now, 7pm local. Tomorrow we arise at 3am to leave the hotel at 4 to fly two hops ending in JFK in late afternoon. Then it’ll be time for overpriced but quite nice dinner and another early bedtime before another early rise then zip down to the Caribbean and back to JFK again on Tue. A final stupid early get-up on Wed will take us home to MIA.