Ice Cream and Tow Trucks

Food for the angels

I found happiness for sale at Kroger today. Private Selection Amarretto Cherry Cordial.

When the kids are in bed and Kris is happily reading in bed, it's ice cream time for me. Kind of like a reward for making it to the end of the day in one piece.

Kids get candy at the bank just for being kids. I get ice cream at the end of the day just for being the mom.

Today's accomplishments included just barely not burning up the engine in my car. I've already burned the engine in one car before... several years ago. It was by accident, of course. Who would do that on purpose?

A disaster waiting to happen

I was one town over and noticed smoke when I parked the car. I'm no mechanic, but it doesn't take much to figure out that the hose thingy needs to be connected, and it wasn't connected.

Maybe going down the cheese grater of a road on US 24 knocked it loose today. Anyway, the car is back in Peru, thanks to a tow. Mr. Car-Fixer-Upper will look at it on Monday.

Kris and the kids came over to get me and wait for the tow truck. It's certainly not the way any of us planned to spend a rainy Saturday, but I'm glad everything worked out the way it did, and I wasn't stranded farther away.

Plus, we got to enjoy Modoc's in Wabash while we waited for a tow. It's a coffee shop with overpriced scones and named for the runaway elephant, Modoc, that got loose in Wabash decades ago.

The coffee is great, and when you order a hot chocolate for the kids, they make it kid temperature. That's nice. It took the possibility of an ER run for burns off the table.

I also went grocery shopping after three or four weeks of limping along on just enough for dinner at night. The kids were out of all their favorite forms of sugar.

What is normally a weekly event of grocery shopping became a marathon today to restock everything in the house, including the kids' favorite forms of sugar.

Liquid hand soap is still not plentiful at Kroger, so we're going back to old-fashioned bar soap for awhile.

We'll have to go over the proper usage again with the kids. Little things like:

• Don't squish it for fun.

• Don't carve it with your fingernails or any other implement imaginable.

• We're not recreating the soap moment in The Christmas Story.

It's the end of a long day, full of car engines, tow trucks, ice cream, soap, and groceries. Still a happy and good day with my family.