A few days ago Mousie, Fen and I all went out to our favorite Chinese food place.  (Mousie was too sleepy to cook, and Fen's cooking is a little scary sometimes!)  Anyway, we ordered three of the vegetarian dinner, only we substituted the hot-and-sour soup instead of the egg-flower.  Mousie generously agreed to eat my soup, and I generously agreed to let her.  It's tasty and delicious, but too spicy for my little bunny tummy; it also clears out the sinuses and I was sick of hearing Mousie sniffle.   I got a selection of the cooked vegetables (some of the cabbage from the Tofu in Black Bean Sauce and some carrots and baby corn from the Steamed Veggies in Broth) and we had a very lovely dinner with lots of leftovers.

As we were leaving, a man about Mousie's age or so came up.  At first we didn't know what to think, but he put his hand on his tummy and made the ASL sign for eat, then the one for help.  We gave him the leftovers (at my suggestion, because Mousie and Fen had obviously forgotten about them) and then we were all about to go our way when the police pulled up!  *gasp!*

They said they'd gotten a call about the man whacking the living daylights out of a poor, defenseless Aunty-Em machine: you know, those ones that like to give out money to people when people feed them plastic and numbers on a pad.  I think he must have gotten mad because the one to went to had already given out all her money for the day and he was hungry.  Anyway, he motioned to Mousie, and she told the police that he needed help cashing his checks.  They looked at the checks, then asked if he had ID.  Fen gave him some paper, and the police let him use one of their pens to help everyone communicate with each other.  Mousie asked him, he pulled out his wallet, then said they wanted to know where he got them.  Mousie asked, he said at home, and then they wanted him to sit over by the police car with it's flashing lights.  So Mousie fingerspelled "they want", then made the signs for "you sit over there".  She really shouldn't have dropped that ASL class at college.  I think she's going to try taking it again over summer.

Anyway, they said they were going to take him in just to double-check on the checks- to make sure he hadn't taken them out of other people's mailboxes- and told us to have a good night.  I'm glad they let him eat while they were waiting, because he was pretty hungry!  I hope everything turned out okay; we had to go.  I guess this is just a good example of how you can help people when you know other languages (or at least a little bit)!