A Two Baby Day

The population of Davis increased by 2 yesterday.  I love sitting at the Inforation Desk and hearing the music box-like sound of Brahms' Lullaby playing softly over the loudspeaker to let the hospital know that a new baby has just been born.  Though these days, I don't know whether to feel happy or sad about the new little arrival, wondeering what kind of world he/she is entering.

The day started with the four of us (Jeri and Alice were here overnight) sitting around eating cranberry muffins and chatting.  Then Alice got her stuff together and took off for a lunch with a friend in Sacramento.  She would then be starting her trip back to Santa Barbara, so this was goodbye.

Jeri borrowed Walt's bike to go to Atria for lunch with my mother and then spent the afternoon biking around Davis to see if it had changed much since her last time here (it hadn't).

Walt took me out to Sutter where I learned that I had an assistant for the day.  Her name was Beloved and I'm not really sure what she was doing there--it's not like the Information Desk is a 2-person job!  But she told me that she had injured her arm and that she was just filling in in various slots around the hospital while she was healing.

As it turned out, it was kind of a busy day and it was nice to have her to run off to deliver flowers, and guide people to where they were supposed to be for various reasons.  We didn't chat much.  She had brought a book of "find a word" puzzles and spent most of her time working those while I finished my book (Doris Kearns Goodman's "Wait Till Next Year.")

At 4:30, Walt came to pick me up and we came home to sit for a bit before time to go out for Family Movie Night.  We try to go to a movie whenever Jeri is here, even though there was slim pickings right now.  Too many CGI-laden shoot-'em-up adventure movies.  Walt suggested Zootopia, which he wanted to see, but Jeri was lukewarm on it.  She preferred Spotlight, which I had seen but the other two had not.  I said I wouldn't mind seeing it again, so Spotlight it was.  Somehow it had a greater impact on the big screen, bringing back anew the shock of size and scope of the Cathaolic church cover-up of pedophile priests.

When I tried to check out how many exactly it was, I found this:

The Vatican revealed Tuesday that over the past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties, providing the first ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse reported to the Holy See since 2004.

What still galls me the most is that Cardinal Law, who orchestrated secret settlements for abuse claims made against at least seventy of his priests, in which families were paid to stay silent about the molestation and rape of their children, was appointed by John Paul II as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the most prestigious churches in Rome, in 2004.

I'm glad that the Boston Globe shone a light on this scandal and set the stage for world-wide investigation of cases of molestation of children. But what a grievous sin that without the work of the team in Boston, this might have gone on forever with the Church continuing to cover it up and move pedophile priests to new parishes with new children to molest.

It was after 8:30 when we got home.  Walt fixed Jeri a "Dark and Stormy" while I got together one of our Blue Apron dinners, a Cuban Pork sandwich with a salad made of kale and fried plantains.

Jeri was so thrilled to see me fixing something with kale that she felt it deserved a photo!

When we first decided to try Blue Apron, my fear had been that the meals might not be large enough to feed us, but I have found that to be far from the case.  I can rarely finish my portion and last night there was enough for the 3 of us, with leftovers.

It was after 10 by the time we finished dinner and time for everyone to go to sleep.  Jeri is leaving today after she and I have lunch with my mother, then life gets back to whatever "normal" is around here, but it sure has been nice to have her home again, however briefly.