Blah. I thought going to sleep early would mean more sleep and get­ting over my jet lag or just weird sleep­ing pat­tern. But no, I’m up early as ever. Although… it IS 9 some­thing in Min­nesota, so maybe I am get­ting bet­ter. What­ever. Here’s my Friday!

Woke up at 7:30. Noticed some­thing odd about Anh Bi. He always snores like crazy when he first falls asleep, but in the morn­ing, he’s whisper-​quiet. Maybe it’s the alco­hol snor­ing. Any­ways, tossed and turned for a while, and Chi Ba came down­stairs at 8:30 and asked me to go with her to pick up Chi Be, who was at her friend’s house. And appar­ently, her friend is new in town and not very good with direc­tions. He said he lived in St. Paul, but he actu­ally lived in Wood­bury, a sub­urb about thirty min­utes fur­ther out. And he said his neigh­bor­hood was about a mile from the high­way exit, but it was more like ten, so we not only had to go to Wood­bury, we had to go to the far cor­ner of Woodbury.

Any­way, after that, went back to Chi Ba’s to pick up Anh Bi, who had con­tin­ued sleep­ing the whole time, and we all went over to Di Hai’s house. Anh Bi and Chi Be went with their par­ents to visit their grandmother’s grave, and Chi Ba took Gio Linh and me down­town and to the mall. We went down­town because Chi Ba needed to pick her her wed­dign gift for Chi Hai. Well, she and a big group of Chi Hai’s friends didn’t want to get any­thing left on Chi Hai’s reg­istry, so they all decided to chip in and get Chi Hai and Nick a travel gift cer­tifi­cate for $1350, for a sec­ond hon­ey­moon any­where they wanted, since they couldn’t get their top choice for the first honeymoon.

At the mall, I was going to look for a wed­ding gift for Chi Hai, but that didn’t really hap­pen. (I was going to buy this for Chi Hai when I saw it back in Davis, but I felt it was kinda stu­pid since the large major­ity of the book was about wed­ding prep, and if I gave it to her as an actual wed­ding gift, about two-​thirds of the book would be use­less.) But yeah, at the mall, Chi Ba and Gio Linh kinda took over the itin­er­ary, since Chi Ba had to spend some store credit she had, and Gio Linh needed for­mal flip-​flops for the wed­ding. I got to hold their bags, though. Stopped by Ong Ba Ngoai’s place to say hi, since it was only a cou­ple of blocks from the mall, and Chi Ba hadn’t seen the new place yet.

Stopped by Chi Ba’s place to pick up her left­over spaghetti, and went to Di Hai’s house to heat it up. Fed all the cousins, and I jumped on the lap­top and posted before Dong Ha took it to work on a Pow­er­Point slideshow she would be show­ing at the recep­tion. I showed her how to add music and time it with the slides, and also tossed out a cou­ple of ideas for cre­ative cap­tion­ing of cer­tain pic­tures. Also worked for a bit on Di Hai’s com­puter and printed out some Viet song lyrics she wanted to have at the wedding.

Cau Minh came by and picked us up and took us to Cau Ba’s house, where most of the fam­ily already was. Oh, and the uncles from Florida were there. Chilled for a while and caught up with them over a cou­ple of beers. Had din­ner. Went down to the base­ment where all the cousins and the younger uncles were hav­ing an impromptu ping-​pong tour­ney. It was a lit­tel weird, actu­ally… they were play­ing dou­bles, but instead of split­ting the table left-​right like I’m used to, they played with a switch-​off rule. As in, after you hit, your part­ner has to hit. Makes for a lot more team­work. I love, though, how every time another uncle came down, he would go, “Watch out, the ping-​pong champion’s here now!” Actu­ally, quote comes from watch­ing the games -

So yeah, Cau Nam and Cau Luan dom­i­nated over Andy and Duc Duy. And then Tu Quynh, Cau Nam’s ten-​year-​old daugh­ter, wanted to play. And he slammed the ball at her, too.

After that, went up to the den, and helped my par­ents print out some more Viet song lyrics, and helped with some ran­dom wed­ding stuff that Chi Hai needed taken care of, like orga­niz­ing the name tags by table set­ting. Every­one started clear­ing out after that, so we stood around out on Cau Ba’s lawn and tried to decide what to do. Got tore up by the freak­ing nuclear mosquitos.

We ended up going back to Cau Dung’s house and drink­ing. Then we went out to Billy’s and drank. Then Cau Dung and Natalie had to go home, but the rest of us went to Mys­tic Lake, the local casino. It’s sup­posed to be a dry facil­ity, but my uncles brought stuff and we drank in the hotel room before they went down to play. I don’t like to gam­ble, so I just wan­dered around. Oh, and I called Peggy, but she was tired, so we didn’t talk that long. Watched my uncles make piles and piles of money at a black­jack table until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any­more. Went back to the hotel room and passed out to Conan O’Brien.