Fire Coming Out Of A Monkey's Head

Man, gotta post more so I can catch back up! I’m only on Sun­day… (Oh, and I’m going to put all names in this post in my frame of ref­er­ence to make it eas­ier for every­one to under­stand. Because of the way Viet works, if I didn’t do this, I’d have to put up a fam­ily tree of my extended fam­ily going back at least three gen­er­a­tions to make sense to you guys.)

By the way… this song is great. It reminds me of a Dr. Seuss story, but is a bit darker.

Woke up at 6:30 and Cau Luan was snor­ing away next to me, so I couldn’t really fall back asleep. Every­one wakes up around 8:30 to say good-​bye to Anh Bi and Chi Be, who leave for the air­port. First thing Cau Luan says when he wakes up is, “Holy shit! When did I get sand­wiched by [Anh Bi] and [Dinh]?!” After they leave, every­one set­tled back down to get some more sleep, except for Cau Truong, who is pack­ing up his stuff. Cau Tuan moved to Cau Truong’s spot on the other bed, leav­ing Linh on the ground by her­self. And that sets up Cau Luan’s quote of the day -

Man, I was too in shock as he was talk­ing to do any­thing other than slowly shake my head, but Cau Truong kept sig­nalling to him to shut the hell up, but Cau Luan didn’t notice until after Linh replied. He just went “Oh shit!” and tried to make him­self not look like an ass. I dunno if it worked for her, but we didn’t bring it up in front of her after that. The worst part is that she under­stands Viet, so not only did she under­stand the Eng­lish about Cau Tuan try­ing to get in her pants, she under­stand the names that Cau Luan called her.

Every­one got back up and packed after that. We checked out in a hurry and took Linh back to her car at Bearpath. Every­one in the car had a good laugh after she got off, and then we headed to Perkin’s to have break­fast with some fam­ily that didn’t make it to the wed­ding. Perkin’s is another chain diner like Denny’s or IHOP. I got the cor­don bleu scram­bler, which was good, but tiny. I should have got­ten the Barn Buster like Cau Luan instead. Oh, and reprised my role as fam­ily food dis­posal. I guess except for Cau Luan, no one else in my fam­ily likes to eat a lot of greasy food after a night of drink­ing, so every­one pushed their extra stuff on me.

Went to Ong Ba Ngoai’s house after that so Cau Tuan, Cau Luan, Cau Truong, and Cau Tinh could meet up with Ba Ngoai Tu and Ba Ngoai Nam (my great-​aunts) and plan out what they were doing between then and when their flight left later in the after­noon. We ended up going to the Mall of Amer­ica and just wan­der­ing around for a while, since it’s about five min­utes from the air­port. They must have ren­o­vated a bit since I was there, since every­thing seems dif­fer­ent. The LEGO store was awe­some, so over­priced, just like I remem­bered. Oh, and we went to the store sec­tion of Rain­for­est Café, because Cau Thuong is try­ing to col­lect a sou­venir from each of their loca­tions. We joked about how no one in our fam­ily could ever get one of those per­son­al­ized mugs, since we only have Viet names. (Except for Michael Lu and Andy.) But I did notice a Peggy mug, which I thought was surprising.

After we took the fam­ily to the air­port, the rest of us went to Cau Dung’s place, and I napped for a cou­ple of hours. Soon, it was time for din­ner, and we headed over to Cau Ba’s house again. Natalie brought Catch­phrase and Cra­nium because she really wanted to play a board game. Di Tien was really excited because Mo Ba was mak­ing some of her favorite dishes.

After all the eat­ing was done, we watched some videos from the wed­ding, and then Chi Hai and Nick opened all their wed­ding gifts from fam­ily. (Because some fam­ily mem­bers are nosy like that and insisted on it!) Then we looked through the bil­lions of pic­tures that Cau Nam and Duong Lan took. That’s when the sec­ond quote of the day came up.

My fam­ily…

After that, Chi Ba took all the remain­ing cousins back to her place to chill for a night. We made (microwave) smores and played games for a while. (Oh, and we didn’t get a chance to play the games that Natalie had brought to Cau Ba’s place.) Then it was movie time, so Chi Ba and I, as rank­ing old­est cousins, split them up by movie rat­ing ages. Made them all brush their teeth and lay out their blan­kets and such. She took the older kids upstairs to watch House on Haunted Hill, and I watched Dodge­ball with the young’uns. I felt that Dodge­ball was a bit inap­pro­pri­ate for the younger cousins, but most of them had already seen it any­ways, so I couldn’t say much. Dur­ing the pre­views, Tu Quynh was all, “I wanna see Girl Next Door so bad!” and I couldn’t help think­ing… “You’re ten… do you even under­stand the premise of the movie?!” Because… it’s kinda sad if my ten-​year-​old cousin knows what a porn star is. What’s hap­pen­ing to the inno­cence of youth these days?

Most of the lit­tle kids passed out in the mid­dle of the movie, since they had been play­ing hard all day. I snuck upstairs to scare the older kids, but half of them were passed out, and the other half wasn’t scared at all. I was dis­ap­pointed, because I heard that was sup­posed to be a good scary movie, but the part I saw sucked. The movie ended, and the kids upstairs passed out, too.

I wasn’t tired, so went back down­stairs to the kitchen, where I get the best recep­tion in the house. Tried play­ing around with my mMode AIM, but it was the most annoy­ing inter­face in the world, so I just gave up and went to sleep after a while.

Tags: America, Chi Ba, Chi Be, Chi Hai, Family, Food, Games, Nick S, Pictures, Quote of the Day, Videos, Viet, Work