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The question mark symbolizes the ambiguity of the trip I undertook. Some of it was good, much of it was indifferent to me, some - UTTERLY boring. But such is life I suppose. And I can blame nobody but myself either, since I was the one who wanted to come in the first place. Serves me right, I guess!
It all started with my adoptive father telling me his little brother, the youngest of four children, would turn 60 soon. Yes, they ain't very young anymore, none of them are. Oldest sister turns 69 in december, then comes another sister whom is poor of health unfortunately (skin cancer, radiation therapy has forced her to remove one of her eyes for example and her kidney - a transplant following another transplant - donesn't work very well either so she's on dialysis too). Then two "boys" at the end, the one I know the closest being 64 years at the moment and will turn 65 on All Hallow's Eve actually.
Well anyway, I don't have much contact with the people I know as my uncle and cousins - three of them: one younger son, one older son and an even older daughter. Not sure their ages, except the youngest one, whom turned 25 on the 28th of february. He was quite ugly as a small kid, but became rather cute when around age ten or so, and now has grown up to become a very handsome young man with a quite cheeky grin + wink which he presented on numerous occations. He inherited his father's (and uncle's) early hairloss, and sported a lovely shaved, tanned (from his + GFs three weeks in Monaco) head when I met him on friday.
On a sidenote: the older brother used to be quite attractive when he was young(er, he's still in his early 30s, LOL), but has become quite mundane as the years have passed. Ah, the irony! 
I left my home on wednesday to spend one day at my adoptive parents' place (and visiting an old classmate as well), then set off for the capital at 11 AM on thursday. Car drive is about six hours, so it's not very fun. Made more pleasant by the fact my adoptive mother did not join us. She's been in a pretty good mood lately, but long trips can easily make her jittery and it was a good thing she did not join.
We talked, I slept some, and had a boring lunch on the way which we spent in part eating and part fighting off wasps (whom are particulary numerous this year due to the warm spring, and quite active and lively due to the warm current weather too - a decidedly BAD combination).
We arrived at my older aunt's place in a suburb south of the capital in the early evening, where she lives with some guy. Not sure what happened to her husband, if they divorced or if she's a widow. No, I don't have much contact with the rest of my family... Guy was nice though, and works as a construction worker/carpenter. We had dinner, we watched the evening news and such. Went to sleep on a sofa that converts to a bed, but was nowhere near as comfortable as the one Nick owns - which actually rivals a real bed. This one was hard, and made my back ache the next day. Me & "dad" spent a few hours down-town walking around, having lunch and such. It was okay, minus side was we didn't really DO anything, plus side was weather was almost too good, and I saw lots of niice guys!
Evening came, we drove north to attend the birthday party. I met three of my cousins (there's more from my older aunt's marriage but I don't know them) for the first time in about nine years - the funeral of my "dad's" mother.
The party was rather pleasant. Middle cousin is now a father too. Baby is nine months old, called Olivia, and was really cute! She didn't wail even ONCE throughout the whole evening, she was all happy and bubbly and enthusiastic the whole time and goo-ed along when one of my uncle's neighbors played on his saxophone. That's a story in of itself actually: a whole bunch of uncle's old classmates went to university together and then all settled down in the same neighborhood, so they're a really tight bunch of people that keep in close contact and share lots of in-jokes and such. They had composed new texts to well-known melodies, for example telling of my ucle's fondness of walking around in his underwear at home (youngest cousins supremely good-looking GF (I envy HER! LOL!) told me he met her in his underwear for the first time. Cousin shouted, "dad, put something on, we got a visitor!", he comes out asking, "huh? what did you say?", of course in his drawers, and that's the way they met... Cousin STILL seemed embarrassed even though it happened like two years ago, LOOOLL!)
The older brother held a small speech on behalf of all three children in honor of their father before delivering their present, and the brother suddenly became quite emotional and started to cry a little. It was so cute. (The present was a ride in a hot air balloon btw.)
Much was said and done during that party, some of which I had hoped to remember to re-tell here, but I seem to have forgotten it. Baahhh! Me and my old head...  Anyway, it was quite nice actually, but it made me wonder (again) what my life would have been like had others made different decisions than they did in the end. That bit was a little depressing.
Wanted to go home on saturday, but the guy who did the driving did not. Had to stay one more day... Spent some time in the city, some of it at an IT-place. Had to pay US$4 for an hour of internet access when it only cost $1.50 in London, what a rip-off! Me & "dad" had lunch at a café, we both had salads. Me, greek, him, tuna. And a muffin each. Total cost, including a cup of coffee, $16! JEEEZ! It's NOT cheap in Stockholm...
We had dinner with both my aunts (the one I lived with, and the one-eyed one), plus one-eyed aunt's french, eh, something. I don't know what his role is in their relationship, but they live together. He's a gourmet chef originally who has run restaurants both here and in France/Monaco (youngest cousin stayed at their apartement there), but now works with repairing bicycles because he's apparantly bored with food these days. Meal was okay (no complaints about the food though). I pretended as best I could to enjoy myself, but I wanted to GGGOOO HHHOOOMMMEEEE...
Afterwards, we played the ancient viking game of 'stump'. Or whatever. Don't know what to translate it as, there is no exact equivalent word in English. Actually, I don't know if it is THAT ancient really, I heard once it's supposedly from that era, but I can't be certain the rules are even close to how they played it even if it's true. Anyway, there's two teams, each team has a row of eight 'stumps' on a line, and each player has two sticks to throw to attempt to knock down the other team's stumps. Inbetween both lines, there's a big stump - the king. If you knock him down, you die. Unless if you've knocked down all the stumps of the opposing team first of course: then you win instead.
When a stump falls over, the team whose stump it was has to throw it over to the opposing team's side of the king and begin by knocking down their OWN stump first before attacking the opposing stumps. These stumps then has to be thrown by the opposing side over to YOUR side and be knocked down even though the stump originally belonged to your team, and so it goes (on and on and ON for quite a while usually as the tide of fortune turns).
If you manage to knock down a stump with a new stump (not the ones standing on the line of the opposing side - just the ones in front of the line and behind the king), you get to stack them (makes it easier to knock 'em down again of course). Two stumps go on top of each other, three makes a small pyramid, four makes a 2x2 tower, etc. We got up to five stumps once, that all went down with one stick...
If you have a stump still standing on YOUR side of the king when the other team runs out of sticks to throw, you can move up the throwing line to that stump and toss your sticks from there. Therefore, it's preferable to knock down all stumps standing on the other team's side of the king, or else you're giving them an advantage. In practice, this isn't very easy, lol. Especially if things are going badly and there's six stumps to knock down... Also, on one hand, you may want to toss a knocked-down stump close to the middle line so you have an easier time to knock it back down again, but if you don't get it down the other team can move up very close indeed to YOUR stumps...
Anyway, for such a simple game in theory, there's a fair amount of rules, and it's quite a lot of strategy too (and more than a bit of luck, since right-angled blocks of wood behave quite erratically when tossed). But quite fun after all.
Anyway, we tossed and tossed our stumps and sticks, and my team lost both matches, and then the other aunt + frenchman went home, and I went upstairs to lie on my bed and listen to music while the rest watched sports taped from earlier in the evening. Sunday, I finally got to go home, but not before going to the completely computer-illiterate one-eyed aunt + frenchman's home to look at their misbehaving computers.
They had a portable where the symptom was "our internet's not working." I could see nothing wrong, but dialling the number to the modem pool produced a voice message stating the number was incorrect, so I suggested getting in touch with the ISP and get the correct number...
The other problem was an HP USB CD burner that didn't work and was presumed broken since the tray (aka: cupholder, LOL) didn't open when the button was pressed. I booted up the darn ancient thing (a Compaq with altogether too little RAM in it YUCK! And the guy had a porn pic of a WOMAN as a desktop background, double-YUCK! ), and it took half an eternity of frantic disk-swapping before it was done. Yes Tim and Nick, it was even worse than your systems!  AND, the desktop was FILLED from side to side with icons... Don't stick every fucking file on your DESKTOP you damn n00b, AAARRRGGGHHH!!
I then installed the IDE-to-USB bridge driver and lo and behold, the thing worked all of a sudden. The CD burner software (dated a fresh and crispy 1999 Anno Domini; didn't bother suggesting he'd find a more recent version since he already had trouble comprehending the most basic of phrases) followed and it found the burner so I HOPE it worked. Can't be sure though since he didn't have any disks to check with, and I had no wish to stay any longer anyway.
Finally we got underway, 10:50 AM, and about six hours later we were back on the west coast, and tonight I will sleep in MY OWN BED. Mmmm. Nice!
-Lenny
"But he that hath the steerage of my course,
direct my sail."
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene IV
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...My stupid computer opens up a new explorer window if I double-click the right mousebutton in an IE window? It forwarded me automatically to some stupid webportal full of ads and shit, so I suspected I had been invaded by some kind of trojan, but now I'm not sure since I only get the about:blank page (my start page).
Where is the default action for right-doubleclick stored, and how do I reset it back to doing nothing? Maybe I should install Ad-Aware... Hmm.
-Lenny
"But he that hath the steerage of my course,
direct my sail."
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene IV
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Grrgh! Thank you Microsoft...
Tim tries to chat with me when I'm out walking.
Setras tries to chat with me when I'm out shopping.
All because the darn messenger thingy refuses to set my status as 'away' when I'm away from my computer! And of course, I forgot to log out completely, which I try to do.
Hope you guys don't think I was ignoring you... I wasn't!
And is anyone else getting like a MILLION email viruses with 300+ kilobyte attachments to them, message header and text in spanish? Well, I sure am...
WHY can't people get themselves a bloody virus killer?!? Sigh!
-Lenny
"But he that hath the steerage of my course,
direct my sail."
-William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene IV
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On fire! |
Location: currently So Cal
Registered: May 2002
Messages: 1179
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Good to hear you are home safe and sound and in yor own bed (anyone joining you?). Relatives can be so much fun.
I'm usually up for learning new games, but the one you described has me stumped. (sorry, couldn't resist.)
Think good thoughts,
e
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BAD timing... 
Re: Glad your home safe 
