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New Addition

January 6, 2011 Comic Books / Family / Movies / Pictures / Post-A-Day 2011
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This is also a bit late, but wel­come to the fam­ily, Josephine “Josie” Pham Sperrazza!

My cousins Chi Hai and Nick S had their sec­ond daugh­ter on Jan­u­ary 2, 2011, so she’s my first cousin once-​removed, but in Viet, she would be called my niece. Sim­pler that way. I can’t wait until I can head up to Min­nesota and see her.

Also, when I first heard her name (her par­ents don’t like to find out the sex of the baby until birth, so they name after birth), I couldn’t help think of Archie Comics.

Or the movie adaptation.

Fire Coming Out Of A Monkey's Head

July 8, 2005 Archives / Family / Food / Games / Pictures / Quote of the Day / Videos
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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 -

“[Dinh], where’d that con quy (demon) go? You know, that con khi (mon­key) that he was try­ing to hit all night? Did he knock her bot­tom off or what?”

- Cau Luan.

“… I’m right here.”

- Linh, from the floor.

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.

“Oh my god! What is he doing?!”

- Di Hai, at the pic­ture of Nick stick­ing his head under Chi Hai’s dress to pull her garter off.

“Oh, he got it. Good job!”

- Di Hai, at the next pic­ture with Nick about to fling it.

My fam­ily… :mrgreen:

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.

Island Of The Honest Man

July 5, 2005 Archives / Family / Pictures / Quote of the Day / Work
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OK, gonna try to squeeze in another post or two before I go back to my other aunt’s (internet-​less) house.

Woke up from a really weird dream on Wednes­day morn­ing. It was a bit like Res­i­dent Evil. Or maybe 28 Days Later. I was run­ning on foot through down­town Davis, and although it was day­time, there was basi­cally no one around. I don’t know why I was con­stantly run­ning, but it felt as though some­thing was chas­ing me, even if I didn’t see any­thing behind me. Every now and then I’d see a friend in the dis­tance or as I entered a store, and I’d run towards them, only to have my friend dis­ap­pear, ignore me, or flat out refuse to help me. Even­tu­ally, it felt like there was no one else I could turn, so I just stopped run­ning. And then a sense of impend­ing doom washed over me, and I jerked awake.

Fun, huh? It was only 7:45, too. I show­ered, watched TV, and had some cereal, and then it was time to go to Cau Minh’s to unpack his PODS into his house. The process con­sisted of Cau Dung, Anh Bi, and I mov­ing all the stuff from the con­tainer into the garage, then wait­ing for Cau Minh to say it was OK for us to bring stuff into the house, because the con­struc­tion work­ers were fin­ish­ing up a cou­ple of the rooms.

For our lunch break, we got But­ter Burg­ers from Culver’s. They are pan-​fried burg­ers with an extra dol­lop of but­ter on top. It tastes pretty good, but the but­ter makes the burg­ers drier than I’d like.

After lunch, got the rest of the con­tainer into the house, and then helped Cau Minh set up shelv­ing in the base­ment. The sec­ond PODS was sup­posed to arrive at 3, but it never showed up. We just unpacked a lot of essen­tials, like the food, because Di Ngoc had to get started imme­di­ately on Chi Hai’s wed­ding cake.

Chi Hai came over after we were done, and told us about her “drama.” Which was, she mis­placed some thank-​you cards and had to buy con­struc­tion paper and make new ones her­self instead, since she had bought out the card store’s entire ship­ment already. She had made such a big deal about it I thought Nick had run out on her or something.

After that, we went to Di Hai’s house real fast to pick up some fold­ing chairs to bring to Cau Dung’s place, since Natalie had invited the entire fam­ily over for phở, which she made with Di Phuong’s help. I passed out in the car ride, because my sleep­less­ness was catch­ing up with me. Din­ner was awe­some, even though I made fun of the mas­ter chef and her new dis­ci­ple. Took a shower after­wards to wash off the grime of mov­ing dirt and sweat, and then chilled with the cousins as the adults ate. Quote comes from the older cousin’s conversations -

“Every­one come to my place for a sleep­over on Sun­day, OK?”

- Chi Ba.

“I can’t, I’m leav­ing Sun­day morning.”

- Anh Bi.

“Aw… OK, you have to come over before then to see my house!”

- Chi Ba.

“Why don’t you come to my house? When was the last time you vis­ited Montréal?”

- Anh Bi.

“OK, I’ll come for New Year’s. Oh wait, do you cel­e­brate New Year’s like we do?”

- Chi Ba.

Man, I laughed until I thought phở would shoot out my nose.

After every­one fin­ished, we had dessert — Di Nga made a cake, and there were two dif­fer­ent kinds from Coldstone’s, too. I told Dong ha she couldn’t have any of those or else she’d be fired. (She works for a com­peti­tor called Cal­i­for­nia Chill.) I was pretty stuffed, so of course it was time to head out for some evening fun with the older kids.

Chi Ba and Mike took Anh Bi and I to a bar called Sally’s because Wednes­day is free drink night for the ladies. On the car ride over, Anh Bi decided that we would tell every­one it’s my bach­e­lor party, and I was get­ting mar­ried to some­one named Stephanie from UCD who just got her MD. And appar­ently it was my last night in town, because I was fly­ing to Vegas on the red-​eye for the wed­ding. I didn’t think it would work, but Anh Bi pushed it on every girl int he bar any­way, and he con­vinced a good num­ber of them to take a pic­ture with me. Then he got a pic­ture with one girl that he was really sprung on, but her man was tow­er­ing over him, so he didn’t try any­thing fur­ther. I’ll post the pic­tures when I get them from him. Nick stopped by, too, but he was just pick­ing up some­thing Chi Ba had for Chi Hai, and couldn’t stick around for more than a beer. Oh yeah, we had some beer called Blue Moon. I wasn’t a big fan, but Mike likes it.

Went back to Chi Ba’s place REAL early — it was only 10:45. Anh Bi wanted to go chill more and was drunk and a bit bel­liger­ent, but we got him back. I wanted to pass out early because the sec­ond PODS came, and we had to go back the next day to work on that, so I wanted to freak­ing sleep. Couldn’t fall asleep, though. Not sure if it was the cousin’s snor­ing, or just ran­dom stuff going through my head. Called Peggy and talked to her until my con­nec­tion dropped (have I men­tioned I hate Min­nesotan Cin­gu­lar ser­vice?), and then just laid down and forced myself to shut off my brain.