Before Christmas

Mom took the day off my first day back. I palled around the house for a bit, before going to Waffle House for brunch. (I nearly cried at the sight of a familiar breakfast.) After that, I drove back to the house and walked to the mall. I walked because I didn't want to deal with the bedlam in the parking lot, but it turned out not to be that bad.

I get a kick out of walking around the mall in no hurry whatsoever, watching people going crazy over shopping. As I mentioned earlier, the frenzy doesn't have any effect on me; I didn't feel any compulsion to buy anything. (TheOrange Julius--one of a few things I would've broken down and bought--closed a couple of years ago.)

Sunday was the Waffle House Christmas party. For at least the past ten years, Dad has thrown a party every year for his employees. (I remember one back in middle school, when he rented the Twin Hills basketball gym for the night, and all of us kids got to play basketball and run around while the parents hung out. Another year, he rented the conference room of Foxwood Country Club, and he and Mom dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus and gave presents to all the kids. See? Waffle House isn't all trashy and gloomy.)

With far fewer of his employees having younger kids, and many more of them being single twentysomethings, the past couple of years Dad has changed up his strategy, renting a bar for the night. This was the first year I've been able to make it, and (apart from the cloud of cigarette smoke) it was a lot of fun. One of his workers, Dawn, had brought her keyboard and performed for us. After a few minutes, some of us went up and sang along with her. Mom and Dad even slow-danced to a song, something I've never seen them do.

Most of the folks got varying degrees of drunk. One of the most amusing was a lady who sat down with Heather, Megan, and me, and began telling us about a novel she's been writing. Apparently it's fifteen years in the making, and she's spent all that time making amazing characters, but no plot.

On Monday, I drove to St. Louis to visit Wakako. The last time I visited her, she was getting ready for her first semester of grad school. This time, she was just finishing up finals. Azusa, a student from Nagano, hung out with us at Wakao's apartment. Wakako made spaghetti, Azusa baked a pizza, and we pigged out and talked for about five hours.

Azusa worked as an English teacher with Aeon for a few years, which you could tell easily: her English is great. The three of us talked about all kinds of random language things, like slang, figures of speech, and other tricky things in English, like "mm-hm" and "uh-huh."

I made the three-hour drive back home that night, relishing the mini-road trip in my Camry at speeds much greater than the 50 km/hr I'm used to.

I also got my birthday present from Mom and Dad: R2-D2! He's about 38 centimeters tall, decorated just like the real thing, has a swiveling head, and obeys voice commands. You can ask him "Do you remember..." and the name of a Star Wars character, and he'll react based on his relationship with the character. (He tootles fondly for Luke, and screeches in terror for Vader.) He performs a rendition of the Cantina music while dancing along. You can also give him a line of direction commands, then have him execute the program. You can do all kinds of nifty things with his motion sensor, like put him in timeout (he rolls to the nearest corner), play hide and seek (he goes to the nearest corner, waits, then rolls around until he finds something moving), or sentry mode (you have ten seconds to leave the room, after which he screeches if something trips his motion detector). He's awesome!