Freak Me Out

It’s been a really lazy day for me today. Was going to take another nap, but couldn’t quite clear my head enough, so hope­fully it will be after I write thise post.

Tues­day… my last day in Min­nesota. I woke up at 5:15, and noticed that the lights were off, which is odd, since I passed out with­out turn­ing them off myself. Fin­ished my laun­dry, and tried to go back to sleep. It didn’t work, though, so I played com­puter games until 8, when my par­ents and Di Phuong woke up. Helped Di Phuong unpack more of Cau Minh and Di Ngoc’s boxes. The first four I went through were entirely liquor bot­tles. It’s crazy the amount of alco­hol they have, since I’ve never seen them drink more than a cou­ple of glasses of wine. Then there was a box of noth­ing but mar­tini glasses. And then three boxes of ran­dom trin­kets from their curio case. As I took all this out of box and unwrapped the news­pa­per from it, I put it all on the table int he for­mal din­ing room. After a while, I real­ized that we had no where to put this stuff, since the wine cab­i­net was full, and the curio case hadn’t been placed yet. So I stopped, and went upstairs and put together some shelv­ing for Bao Han, Dang Khoa, and Dang Quang’s clos­ets, so they could take their clothes out of their boxes.

Di Hai brought her car over after that so that my mom and Di Phuong could go to Costco and the gro­cery store to buy some stuff. I went with her back to her place to fix her com­puter, which she had been ask­ing me to do since Chi Hai’s wed­ding was announced and my flight was booked. Her DVD drive was easy to fix, and I cracked a bajil­lion games for her to play. Wasn’t sure what the prob­lem was with her video play­back, since she didn’t have any “bad” files to test, but I just installed an exten­sive codec pack and hoped for the best.

After that, stayed at Di Hai’s house for a while for the inter­net and got online to chat and post. The three-​way con­ver­sa­tion with Mommy Tang and Jackie was great. I could feel the love.

Took a shower and headed back to Di Ngoc’s place for din­ner. The aunts made spaghetti for the kids, and sticky rice and lemon grass ribs for the adults. I got plate­fuls of both. Chi Ba and Mike came by for din­ner, too. They were plan­ning on tak­ing me out on the town again after din­ner, but Chi Ba was pretty sick, so we decided not to. Played Bat­tle of the Sexes instead, and the guys won, even though the girls cheated. They would draw ques­tion cards and be like, “No, [one of us] would know that.” And then put it back and draw a new card. They even cut the deck sev­eral times, lead­ing to a point where they kept get­ting ques­tions they had asked us ear­lier in the game because they cut so much. Quote comes from the con­ver­sa­tion dur­ing the game.

I think the first time she said it was when I knew a large amount of fab­ric was a “bolt.”

All the natives went home, and I played Last Card with the kids and owned this time. (I had just re-​learned the game the night before, and hadn’t caught on to all the nuances of the rule yet.) My nick­name on the score sheet was “Freak­boy” due to my mad answer­ing abil­i­ties from Bat­tle of the Sexes. Then I played Mon­sters, Inc. Mem­ory with Dang Quang. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, because they use the the same pic­ture with dif­fer­ent color back­grounds, and it counts as com­pletely dif­fer­ent cards.

After that, the younger kids started to knock out, and the older kids were gos­sip­ing in a dif­fer­ent bed­room, so I went down­stairs and wrote down some stuff and thought about stuff and even­tu­ally fell asleep.

Tags: Chi Ba, Chi Hai, Computer, Games, Internet, Work