Today was a good day. We got to mostly hang out around the Hepler House of Excellence & Relax*. (Usually I'm far too busy and important for that.) I got a lot of dishes and laundry and piano practicing done, and Eva got a lot of sleeping done. The weather has been absolutely beautiful the last couple of days. It has been noticeably cooler--in other words, not as hot as h-e-double hockey stick--and breezy and sunny. Around noon we, along with the rest of base, went to the BX to pick up a few random items and ran into our friend who just brought her adopted baby back from China. She is precious, and I feel privileged to have gotten to see her so soon after landing. These friends are borrowing some of our baby stuff, for which they keep thanking us, but the truth is that we're getting the good end of the deal. Have you ever tried to store an exersaucer??
Wait, if they're borrowing our baby stuff, that means I don't have a baby. My little Eva is a gigantic toddler. Every day she discovers something new. Tonight, while trying to avoid eating her dinner (she's going through a not-eating phase and she has a cold) she discovered that if she smooshed her steamed peas on the end of her finger like a fork, they would often stick and then she would carefully bring it to her mouth with an exaggerated "ahhhhrrrmmmm!". No thumb needed! A new level of efficiency! You might wonder why I was feeding her steamed veggies when she is not eating, but they're actually her favorite. Good girl. Of course, after success with several peas she tried it on a corn kernel, which was less successful. But to my surprise she pulled it off a couple of times.
After dinner we went on a walk. Sunrises and sunsets here are quick--not quite tropical quick, but, you guessed it, subtropical quick. The diet coke of quick. No lingering luxury like Arizona. Not blink-of-an-eye either. OK I think you get the point. It was mid-to-late dusk for our walk, so the Okinawan fruit bats / Okinawa flying foxes were out. They are, on average, the size of female red-tailed hawks in Virginia but some are much bigger. (What? That doesn't help you?) For bats, they're huge. I love being out at dusk because it's still light enough that you can look straight up and see one's pitch-black silhouette against the lapis sky. We lucked out and a smaller one (maybe only about 10 inches head to tail) landed in a tree right next to the sidewalk. I pointed him out to Evangeline and she watched, interested, as he did the upside-down shimmy. Then I shouted and clapped at it and it whooshed away, and Eva went "dat!" and pointed to the branch it had left.
If you go to that Wikipedia article on megabats, you will not only learn the word "megabat" but also frugivorous, nectarivorous, and chiropterophily. Apparently the sausage tree benefits from chiropterophily (mutualism between fruit bats and plants)...I did not know that sausages grew on trees.
*Even though things are less funny when you explain them, I'm going to do it lest you think we're just really pretentious. "...of Excellence" is what Army tacks onto the name of every school/center ever. "Relax" is the European hospitality industry's favorite word, and they always use it where "relaxation" would be the proper choice. Hence Hepler House of Excellence & Relax.
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