The Ides of November
It has been more than a week since the last update. Last Saturday (the 8th) my kids and I went to a friend's house to pack meals for the homeless. There is a wonderful organization in Des Moines that delivers hot meals all over the city to homeless encampments and people on Sundays. Numerous families all over the city take a weekend and make 40 meals (there are maybe 5 families per weekend). The rest of the week, the soup kitchen is open, but on Sundays the meals come to the people. We used to help my sister-in-law every month with this, even after we moved away from Des Moines, but once she got married, and I had a fourth kid, we stopped doing it so often. It was a special feeling to be back and working again.
One Week Update
Tintin comic incoming:
No-Chill November
November gets a lot of weight put on it besides the impending Thanksgiving feast and Black Friday consume-a-thon. There's the recently-defunct NaNoWriMo, where people were challenged to write 50,000 words in a single month (something I'd often hoped to do but never really had time for). Then there's the weird "No-{blank} November", in which the blank could be filled with many other things like shaving. My former church used No-Shave November to raise money for adoption funds, for instance. So with this theme in mind, I was feeling severely unchill about the state of the world at the beginning of October and picked "No-Chill November" for my personal theme.