you should have specified

Sometimes being a parent is frustrating.  Because you try so hard to indoctrinate your children with your values (which are superior to anyone else's, that's why you have those values), and then they go out into the world and well-meaning idiots tell them that our duty to treat one another with respect is contingent upon people behaving according to a given set of social customs.  Not in those exact words, obviously, but with their actions.  We heard a choice anecdote yesterday about a boy who was driven, DRIVEN I say, to a pornography addiction when he went to the city pool and saw some young women who were dressed in bikinis, and then another story that basically amounted to, "Welp, the boys don't say naughty things about girls who are dressed modestly."  Ugh, because of course it has nothing to do with the fetishization of women's bodies, or social conditioning that teaches boys they have a claim upon women, or the immense shame associated with moral failings that drive them into secret places to fester and rot, or the refusal to take responsibility for one's own faults and shortcomings. . . none of that is going on, I'm sure.  Anyhoodle, I spend a lot of time detoxifying my children of all the harmful folk doctrine they encounter here and there, and it's exhausting.  Like it's not hard enough doing my job as it is.

Kind of excited about the government shutdown that is or is not happening, according to which source you consult.  Will we lose power?  Will we have to eat our food storage?  Will it be like a nationwide campout?  I'll bring the s'mores as long as you guys are cool with dark chocolate.  Have you had those huge marshmallows, the muy grande ones?  Too big.  Too much of a good thing; it throws the proportions all off.

I have just seen a thing called a walking taco?  What is this?  Have you had it?  It looks horrifying but you better believe I would eat it.

By the way, the mini-pies turned out nice.  The fluted paper pans were wrong for it, because there's no rim and you can't make a crimped edge.  But for the second batch I got some little aluminum ones from Orson Gygi that were better.  I just don't want to sell pies in aluminum pans; it seems so declasse.  King Arthur Flour has some paper ones with an edge that I think would work marvelously.  I came up with a better way to make a peach pie as well, one that won't get me disparaging remarks written on my evaluation paper by the pie judge.  Basically with a peach pie you need to put in the right amount of sugar and get out of the way.  Have I ever asked for your opinion on peach meringue?  Because I think that might be a good one.