ready. shuffle.

We managed to get G’s birthday in order on Saturday: cake, invites, balloons, helium, streamers, and pinata! Oh, and kids. I love piles of kids.

His haul of stuff from various folk consisted primarily of cash, gift cards, and Pokemon schwag. There has been resurgence (some might say a plague) of Pokemon in the commune over the last few weeks. The boys have gone wonky. H. picked out two massive, special packages of cards as a gift - they are apparently the Holy Grail containing lost cards of yore. I think I saw H. fighting off hordes near the collector card section of Target with nothing more than a whip and fedora. Who knows? The real question is this: what does a ready stash of money and a gift card really lead to? This: can we go to Target? Can we go now? How about now? Now? Target? Now? When can we go? I’ll get to that soon enough.

The Eleven rode our bikes to the Dupont Circle Farmers Market yesterday morning – blowing out the carb on her new, fancy bike. It’s about an hour-and-half roundtrip with flowers, veg, and other goodies as a break in the middle. We only end up riding on city streets for about a ¼ mile on either end of the bike path. Very nice. I toted home the goods in my trailer and managed to survive the double hills of death near the end our the ride. We’re planning on loading up the trailer with kit and riding out to the Maryland countryside for a camping experiment next weekend.

On to Target. After we get back from trying to revive X’s laptop yesterday I finally took the boys and their piles o’ loot to Target. It’s about a ten minute drive and the excitement in the backseat was beyond containment. I might as well have been toting around a couple of children speaking a foreign language; for some reason, they felt a burning desire to address me with plans, stories, and Pokemon history. Here’s a summary, see what you can do with it. Nevermind who’s actually speaking, it’s irrelevant…I didn’t even know.

“We need a Silcoon from the EX deck because his health in the Pearl series is the best. It’s wicked good to evolve into Cascoon. Oscar has a Wurmple, which we don’t have, but we’ve got a super deck that Henry built. I built it. Henry built it. It’s widely known that Oscar has the most powerful deck in all of Arlington. Mantyke, which we need evolves into a Mantine if we have Remoraid present in the trainer's party. Hey Todd. Do you know what we love about EX? Kadabra immediately evolves to a Fire Alakazam when traded, and Oscar will trade one. You know why I can get cards from Oscar? He pretends not to want something, like a Seadra, but he really does. Anyway. I pretend I don’t want it, either. My Dusclops can’t evolve to a Dusknoir during a trade unless I have the Reaper Cloth – I don’t have the Reaper Cloth. I always get the cards from Oscar in the end. We just got the Dubious Disc so we can trade the Porygon2 and get and evolved Porygon-Z tomorrow. I finally got my Bulbasaur to evolve…well it was Bulbasaur at level 16, now it’s Ivysaur….I evolved it finally, at level 32 to Venusaur. Are we there yet?”

Yes.

T