Oatmeal is simmering, my family is happily reading, and I'm tired of reading news of fresh disasters on my phone, so I'm going to write something. I don't know what it'll be yet, and I don't have much time.
Before I resorted to my phone (handier int he kitchen than a hard-cover book), I was reading John Le Carré's memoir The Pigeon Tunnels—which is fantastic, by the way. Specifically, a chapter about the last days of Phnom Penh before it fell to the Khmer Rouge. There was a wonderful anecdote (possibly true) about a woman who took a whole pack of orphaned children in to the American Consulate demanding passports for them all. When she was asked where their mothers were, she said "I am their mother." When further questioned about how she could be the mother of so many children roughly the same age, she said "I had a lot of quadruplets." According to the legend, the wink and nod worked and she got the children out.
Then I got to my phone and there was a story about what's happening in the Philippines right now, IS fighters taking over a city on the one majority-muslim island (or one of the few ones?) in the nation, Mindanao. It makes me want to fly over there and adopt a lot of quadruplets.
Alright, oatmeal is ready and family is hungry.
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