Seven-year-old becomes 8: no discernible change

The big event took place amid a fanfare of trumpets and a squeal of delight.

The fanfare was due to the curry ingested the previous evening - Mrs. Ottawacker risked setting foot outside the door to pick up from the Light of India, which still remains the favourite 20 years on. The chef might have been having a rough day, however, as the  Sag Gosht was on the spicy side of hot. 

However, Ottawacker Jr. wasn't going to put a little thing like his father's bowels ruin his big day - even if his big day was a school day and his school day was a remote school day and his remote school day was hampered by Bell Canada's inability to provide a functional service to the capital city of a first-world country.

In between classes, and phone calls, we opened gifts and had snacks, Mrs. Ottawacker delved into the recesses of her patience to get beaten at Kick-Tipp, and we all had a wonderful time. 

The social distancing norms were observed to perfection as his friend W dropped off a gift. This pleasant event soon deteriorated into a snowball fight, where the difficulty of hitting moving targets at 2-3 metre distances was nicely demonstrated. When W & family had disappeared however, the shots suddenly improved. 

"Just a photo for the blip?" I asked. 
"Fine," he said. So I focused the camera, then looked up just in time to get a perfectly placed ball of slush in the face.

The evening also witnessed an unaided victory for Ottawacker Jr. in Scrabble. Having managed to find "FICTION" in his tiles, he then placed it on a triple letter and a double word, used all his tiles of course, and added to two other words as well. This is not good. For me, at any rate.