After getting some chores done (most notably, cleaning the fish tank; once again, the snail population continues to outpace our ability to contain it), I took Benji on a neighborhood scavenger hunt on Saturday afternoon. He never wants to go for walks, so I didn’t frame it as a walk, and I didn’t force him to go to a park to walk on trails.

Instead, Ian and I just created a very long list of items to find that required quite a bit of walking. We ended up spending nearly an hour outside, all told, and found all but one item (“An out of state license plate” — a bummer, since our next-door neighbors have a Corvette with Minnesota plates, but their garage door was closed so we couldn’t see it).

Benji used my old phone to take pictures as we found each item. I made sure to ask permission from people if they were around before letting Benji take a picture of their property.

While we were out, we came upon a large circle of neighbors all sitting around chatting — six feet apart. Each set of couples had brought folding chairs and set them up six feet apart from the next couple. It looked like a great idea, although many of the ladies had bundled up in puffy jackets. The breeze did get cold, especially sitting around. They helped us find a couple scavenger hunt items (“A house painted an unusual color” and “A wild animal” –oh, and “Houses with teddy bears in the window“).

When we got home we watched Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back and ate pizza. Could be much, much worse.