Path: orb!not-for-mail
From: li@kryphos.Data-IO.COM (Phyllis Rostykus)
Newsgroups: alt.kalbo
Subject: Road Trip! (2 of 5)
Date: 24 Jan 1995 04:34:14 -0000
Organization: Duchy of Wabesylvan Obspauk
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Days at home... they're always an adventure even when everything is 
familiar.  It's interesting, always, to come back to San Diego, to see 
all the changes, and find out all the new things that Mom and Dad and 
Kathy are in.

The Holidays make it even more interesting in a lot of different ways.  
More things that are kinda scheduled, more shopping to do, more things 
to be aware of, and more stuff that is simply expected to happen.  Some 
are just family tradition. Things like Christmas Eve dinner, time to 
sit around and talk, lots of videos, and a few really amazing meals.  

One of the really cool things was seeing a showing of Mom's paintings.  
We went to one of the public libraries and saw a showing of the paintings 
that were done by Mom and the folks in her class.  It was *really* neat 
seeing the stuff hung up to show, and just slowly looking at all the 
different paintings and marvelling, anew, at how people can capture 
*things* with color on paper.  It was cool having John take a picture of 
Mom next to her painting of a leaping carp. 

A couple of the annual traditions involve visiting a number of our 
favorite spots in the Pacific Beach and San Diego area.  These places 
are Trader Joe's, El Indio's, an In-And-Out Burger, the Big Dog outlet 
store, and the PB Brewery.  Places that don' exist up north and places 
where we can get stuff that we can't get up north.  O.K.  So there's a 
Big Dogs outlet up in North Bend, the big difference is that we can't 
get exactly the same deals up north as we can down south where flannel 
shirts aren't necessary or as much of a fad as they are up north.

We managed a couple of the annual stops Christmas Eve as we did the last 
of our gift shopping.

Trader Joe's is a discount gourmet shop that sells really high quality 
food for low prices. We got a few of the pound plus bars of 66% cocoa
butter semi-sweet French chocolate.  Something that we can't find anywhere
else, and love using in our chocolate chip cookies; three twelve packs of
Hansen's soda in flavors we can't find up north including grapefruit; and
dried blueberries. There was also a number of small things we could get.
We did manage to find the extra gifts we needed.

Hungry and thirsty from the shopping we then did our pilgrimage to 
El Indio's.  El Indio's is one of the best Mexican food shops in San 
Diego.  It has a kind of fast food service style, but the food is 
absolutely excellent, traditional Mexican and hearty.  The portions are 
almost always too big.  Which makes it a lot of fun to eat at.  They're
also the shop that got me hooked on tamales.  We got our food and sat in
the sun to eat it.  Kathy was *freezing* in the low 70's degree weather in
the wind while John was happy in short sleeves and shorts, so I lent her my
sweatshirt.

Afterwards we went to go play at the Balboa Park merry-go-around, one of
the last in the country that still plays the game of the brass ring; but
the Merry-go-round was closed, sigh...

Christmas Eve dinner was fun.  Traditional turkey, stuffing, mashed 
potatoes, broccoli, rolls, gravy, cider, Chinese liquor, and wine, and 
pumpkin pie and whipped cream to end it all.  An amazing feast and lots 
of fun to share.  It was, as usual, really, really good and stuffed 
everyone most amazingly. 

Christmas morning waited on Kathy getting back to the house, and then we 
sat around and opened presents.  Mom and Dad were really surprised with 
what we finally did end up getting them from the art shop, and really 
enjoyed what they got.  Kathy was surprised by the fact that there were 
*two* CD's instead of just the one that we had gotten her in front of 
her.  We were really pleasantly surprised with a breadmaker.  THAT was 
really neat.  We'd always enjoyed the breads that Dad had made on his 
machine when we came to visit, so they thought we would enjoy being able 
to do the same.  Neat.  The fruit breads that Dad made were great for 
breakfast, a single slice with half a grapefruit and something to drink 
was perfect for breakfast.  Another Godsend was the box of Ibarra 
chocolate that Kathy gave me.  I'd been badly missing my hot chocolate 
in the morning.  I immediately quartered a circle and made myself a mug. 

Another thing that I found myself missing terribly was my Internet 
access.  Dad managed to get me some access, but it was through his 1200 
baud modem, through a really dumb terminal, to the point where even vi 
wouldn't work in anything but open mode.  Yeep.  I was suffering bad 
withdrawal, especially from Mark and Flynn's constant flow of email that 
I even braved the open mode to send *something* back to them.  Not for 
too long though.  Sigh.  It drove me nuts to the point where I just 
called both of 'em Christmas Day instead of writing them extensively. 
One thing that *didn't* help was that someone at work sent a number of 
people a 2.5 *meg* mail item that caused my work account to completely 
overflow its 5 Meg limit.  Argghhhhh... 

Christmas afternoon was spent mostly at the Kenn, i.e. the Kennsington 
theater, the local theater for movies that would never make it to your 
local video store, or movies that you'd never want to see on a small 
screen.  We got to see a Jackie Chan martial arts flick and then we got 
to see The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk.  Kathy's lead in to the movie was 
that there is a kung-fu contest for the hand of this princess.  Fong Sai 
Yuk is a really great martial artist, but, even for him, the contest was 
too great, so, in his place, he sent the person who had taught him 
everything he knew.  His mother.

Grin.

It was a really funny movie, balancing between legend and comedy as 
quickly and lightfootedly as the martial artists in the movie.  There 
were some *really* great sight gags, and lots and lots of fun lines that 
even came through in the English-as-a-third-language subtitles.  There 
were also Chinese character subtitles as most of the movie was in 
Cantonese, though bits and pieces were in Mandarine as well. If you get 
a chance to see it, I *highly* recommend it.  The star of the movie was 
Jet Li and it may be running in your local Hong Kong M.A. movie series.  

Christmas Day in the Li family tradition is a day of much video viewing.  
The only thing that's ever open on Christmas Day is the movie theater 
and the video rental stores.  We also saw all of the Muppet's Christmas 
Carol, and pieces of Baron Von Munchausen.  Really cool films, both, as 
we ate a simple feast of Costco potstickers.  Yum.

The day after Christmas vacation started kinda late.  Mom and Dad went 
off on the early Day After Christmas sales day, and we slept in.  Yum.  
Up around 10:30 and a very light breakfast and we were then off for dim 
sum at a local restaurant.  Since it was a week day we had to order 
things instead of having the carts come by.  But we got all the things 
that we love best.  Some of which I had never really known the names of, 
but did know how to point to.  Mom and Dad knew all the names and 
coached Kathy and I into saying 'em and remembering 'em.  

Most of the afternoon was spent going the impossible.  

Cleaning Out the Garage...

Oooooo...

Grin.

As Kathy put it, the modern equivalent to cleaning out the Stables that
Hercules took on is attempting to clean out the garage.  Mom and Dad had a
very solid accumulation in the third garage.  Most of the top layer was
cardboard boxes that could be recycled.  There was enough stuff that
needed to be thrown away that we were able to completely stuff the Range
Rover with recyclable stuff in the afternoon and then separate enough
stuff that needed to be thrown away for another load.  After all that work
we did a 'simple' dinner of Chinese spaghetti, i.e. 'Fried Sauce Noodles'
with slivered cucumber.  Yum.

Kathy, John and I dragged Mom and Dad to the Fong Sai Yuk movie.  THAT 
was a lot of fun, 'cause Mom and Dad had a lot of fun translating things 
for us.  It turns out that the 'Yuk' of the name is actually the same as 
one half of my personal name.  It's the common word for jade, and the 
'Sai' is the same word that in Mandarine is Sho which is Chinese for 
'small'.  Mom has a friend who spoke Cantonese natively, and she noted 
that when the friend said the Mandarine words for 'fried shrimp' (sha 
ren), her accent turned it into 'kill someone' (sa ren).  

The next day was the day to take care of the rest of the traditions and 
stock up on the things we couldn't otherwise get.  For the morning 
cuppa, I had to separate another circle of Ibarra, and used one of Mom's 
cleavers to cut it.  Problem was that it didn't like me doing that, and 
bit me when I wasn't looking.  I guess it wanted to get reaquainted or 
something, but I looked down and a piece of skin about as big around as 
the tip of my pinky was just gone.  Sigh.  Several bandaids and a lot of 
time with my hand in the air later, it stopped mostly bleeding. 

Even with just my left hand I was still able to help John and Dad load 
the Range Rover with garbage until it was so full that I couldn't fit in 
the car.  John and Dad rode off both to dump everything and go to the 
AAA for all the maps John and I needed for the trip east and north.  We 
told Kathy to arrive around 1pm.  She didn't get there until 1:30pm and 
we were *starving*.

So we just took off for In-And-Out and managed to get one of each of the 
combo specials for each of us.  In-and-Out is a chain of hamburger 
joints native to Southern California.  Their menu consists solely of a 
hamburger, a cheeseburger and a double cheeseburger (the Double Double), 
french fries and the usual assortment of pops.  Everything is made as 
it's ordered, and the french fries are made from fresh potatoes that you 
can watch them peel, run through the potato slicer, and then fried to 
perfect crispness.  For each burger they make they have a combo which is 
the burger, fries and a medium pop.  And that's it.  Since the menu's so 
limited they're really good at what they do.  Burgers in the sunshine.
Yum.

The Big Dogs store still had the picture of Fezzik and I up on the Dogs' 
Board.  They were also having a huge after Christmas sale that included 
their flannel shirts for about half price!!  Hurrah.  <grin>  Then to 
the Pacific Beach brewery to give poor John a pint of porter to clear up 
his sinuses and me ten ounces of the same to keep him company and Kathy 
had pop.  The three of us then went to the beach and wandered up and 
down watching the rollerbladers and the waves as I appreciated just how 
warm the flannel shirts were and was glad that I'd bought them.  

The local grocery store yielded dried Masa for tamales (with four 
recipes completely in Spanish), half a dozen more boxes of Ibarra 
chocolate for about two thirds the price that we got them for in 
Seattle, and some provisions for the trip north.  

Mom then continued the tradition of stuffing John and I silly by taking 
us to the Homestead Cafe, which is a smorgeshboard type place with 'good 
olde American food' and encouraging us to eat everything in sight.  
Afterwards we went to a video store and Kathy got to pick.  We spent the 
evening watching _The Real McCoy_, which turned out to be pretty good, 
and then said our goodbyes to Kathy even as we loaded her car with all 
her loot.  

The next morning was breakfast and then loading the car and saying 
goodbyes and thank yous and giving Mom her birthday present.