Sharing interests with a kid is complicated

Wordle 455 3/6

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And then there's puzzles like this.

Yesterday I biked the kid to school. No exercise other than that, though. We had a cleaner come, so there was someone else around the house all day.

Work was busy too. The biweekly report was rough. Several individual team's reports were late, and for no good reason. If someone is in the ER or is dealing with a big, unpredictable crisis for their main job, I have sympathy. (Predictable crises, though, some people should manage their time better...) But if two people on a team each thought the other was doing it, or they did it but forgot to let us know, I have less sympathy. We're supposed to have all the reports by close of business Thursday. Realistically, we never do, but as long as we have them all by 9 AM Friday there isn't really a problem. Most days we're still looking for one or two by 11 AM. Yesterday we were still looking for three by noon. I exchanged emails with my manager and team about how, if at all, we could improve this mess.

So work was messy, but for me at least the hard part was done by 2. We could relax a bit in the afternoon. We picked the kid up at the last minute to get her to gymnastics class. While she was in there, we thought about returning a Tintin book to the library unread but ultimately didn't, and went to the bookstore and made a couple impulse buys. 

Dinner was at the neighborhood Indian place, where we met the kid's friend who is moving and her mother. The kid's friend came home with us for a sleepover. (The first time we've hosted one. The kid slept over at a friend's house when she was 4 right before everything shut down, and at an adult friend's house at least once since then but that's different.) The sleepover part last night was uneventful; I just read them a story and they went to sleep in separate beds.

The title of the post is in reference to Tintin. When I was a kid in the 90s or maybe even 80s, I read all the books but the first two and thought nothing of problematic parts of them. Then I went to France and read the first two, one of them being Tintin in the Congo, and holy shit, that was obviously racist even to an 18-year-old before the word "woke" had its current connotations, and in hindsight some parts of the books I had liked before were suspect. T. was concerned about letting the kid read my old Tintin books. I assured her it was fine and I didn't have the really bad ones. I remember some positive lessons in Tintin, where he and a Tibetan friend complain about racist stereotypes! 

But I soon learned it was more complicated than that. OK, it's not outright racist propaganda like Birth of a Nation, but it doesn't have to be that to be bad. Gone with the Wind is also very problematic. In and after France I realized that Tintin had some Portuguese stereotypes in it; I didn't even realize those were a thing growing up in Vermont. Even the "good" Tintin books have a lot of white savior stuff. Noble savages are still savages. 

I'm not saying the kid can't read them - for one thing, it's too late - but I wish I had thought a bit harder first.