It’s time for summer staycation featuring BB. Mom and Dad are giving brother the gift of vacation by babysitting BB at their place for a week. I’m visiting home for half the week, heading down Tuesday after work and then coming back up Friday evening.

(But first, gotta get through two days of WORKWEEK rrrraaaaahhh….I was hoping to get my current project done before I left. Single-module, yeah? But when I sat down Monday to give it a good hard look, I realized there was no chance in the slightest. I talked it over with everyone at the Tuesday meeting and the consensus was “hm, this is kinda complex” and possibly we aren’t even going with my initial design plan, which makes me feel better about the whole thing.)

It's like an oven outside. I've been evading the heat wave by staying inside basically 24/7. Five years after pandemic lockdown ended, my commitment to Going Outside every day has crumbled. But today I got a solid amount of 93-degree weather walking to the train station and then the other train station in the mid-afternoon sun. Human enrichment or something.

In the train station, I nearly succumbed to astute marketing: there was a Hot Wheels vending machine, and I thought, yooo I could buy one of these for BB. I held off, remembering the big bucket of cars at Mom and Dad's place.

I arrived at around 6:30 and we went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. BB was so excited. He has no inside voice (despite our frequent admonitions). We probably annoyed the heck out of all the other diners, but we had fun. Cool things in the restaurant from the POV of a three-year-old: the plastic butterflies on the walls; the hanging lanterns with tassels to try and grab; the calendar hung up on the door of the kitchen (I had to pick him up so he could point to and read every number); NOODLES. Literally everyone else in the restaurant knew we got noodles due to BB's excited shriek when the dish reached our table. Mom snapped a pic of him scarfing down noodles with a ferocious look of concentration on his face.