Dinner Dog

Man, been in Min­nesota for almost a week now, and this will be my first post about a full day in town. I didn’t think it’d be this hard to get online, but of all my extended fam­ily, only one cousin (the one who’s get­ting mar­ried) has it at her condo. And I have recep­tion for my cell almost nowhere. Arg!

So yeah, here’s my Sun­day. I woke up at 6 AM. Which is 4 AM bacak in Davis. I thought briefly of call­ing up some peo­ple and see­ing if they were still up. Of course, no one else was up yet, so I read War­rior Élite, watched TV, wrote down notes for this future post on my paper pad (it feels so weird to do it on paper!) and, being com­pletely out of things to do, napped until 11, when Cau Dung got back from work and Anh Bi woke up. We caught the end of League of Extra­or­di­nary Gen­tle­men because Anh Bi had never seen it, and then we headed over to Ong Ba Ngoai’s new place.

Helped out a bit, mostly unpack­ing and clean­ing stuff, and got a call from Chi Hai to make plans with us for the night. That’s where quote comes from.

Oh, and it was also amus­ing how Cau Minh’s kids were all… “All the cousins? What about Cousin X?” And we’d go “Yes, Cousin X, too. ALL the cousins.” Many times, actually.

We went to Big Bowl for lunch after that. It’s an Amer­i­can­ized Asian food place with a Mon­go­lian BBQ-​ish offer­ing. I had the curry chicken. It was… edi­ble. I don’t see this chain spread­ing to Cal­i­for­nia any time soon.

Then we went with Di Hai and Cau Dung to a bunch of elec­tron­ics stores because they wanted to get a plasma or LCD TV for Ong Ba ngoai’s new place, since there isn’t really room in the liv­ing room for their old TV. (By the way, while we were dri­ving around, I saw a yel­low Mus­tang. ) But yeah, we finally set­tled on one at Best Buy, but When Di Hai called around to make sure it was cool with all the aunts and uncles (they were all going to split it), Cau Ba said he could could get one for cheaper, and while Cau Dung didn’t agree, Di Hai said for­get it, let him try.

Went back to Ong Ba Ngoai’s old place to help clean up a bit. I didn’t real­ize just how much crap they still had. We threw all this junk into their garage spot, which they use for storage.

After that, went to Chi Hai’s place with all the cousins. She bought Juicy Lucy’s for us all. They are burg­ers with melted cheese inside the patty… very good. Oh, apprently, when they sell the burg­ers, they have a dis­claimer about how hot the cheese is at first. And how it tends to explode out of the patty. Gio Linh got some in her hair. Chi Ba came back from chill­ing with her friends and came over with Mike, too. We chilled, watched Ocean’s Twelve, and played Guess­tures, boy cousins vs girl cousins. The girls were up by a bit, but then the older cousins and I took off for 21-​and-​up fun.

So we went to this Irish pub called “The Local.” Tried to teach every­one to play Buf­falo, but they were all pan­sies and wouldn’t play right, so they bar­gained it down it down to three finger’s worth instead of down­ing the drink. And they made up a pun­ish­ment for mis-​Buffalos, too. I did some stuff on pur­pose just to drink. Chi Be was very amused by “trick­ing” me with her leftiness.

Walked back to Hennan’s place, where the cousins smoked up. I sat in the cor­ner and watched the antics. Then we went back to Chi Hai’s place. I killed some left­over burg­ers, and Anh Bi pushed Nick to drink more with him. Every­one else passed out, and since this was the one place I could get inter­net, I was online until about 2:30 in the morning.

Tags: America, Chi Ba, Chi Be, Chi Hai, Family, Food, Friends, Gio Linh, Internet, Work