Sunday

On the way to Le's Café yesterday, I was dealt the King spades by Lê Quý Đôn Street. That gives me an unsuited King and Six so far,* encouraging enough dangerous optimism to bet. Once we got home after two iced coffees and one soursop shake, we decked the house. It had been one week since we bought our Christmas tree and only two days since our second shipment of books and furniture. Somehow, in that short time, we'd cleared off enough dining room table space to build a Christmas tree there. Asian Christmas tree instructions: 1. Install the stand; 2. Pull the branch off the trunk, and bend the branches down to an angle about 75 degrees; 3. Open the leaves of the branch, and adjust them, so they spread out both right and left, in the way natural leaves grow; 4. Assemble the top part of the tree to the bottom part and there you get the tree. And, easy as that, we had a realistic meter-tall stark white plastic fir tree. Sunshine followed these instructions while I was untangling the little light strings we'd gotten that same day. She pointed out that the diseased-looking bush thing being assembled in the accompanying illustrations was a deliberate maneuver on the part of the manufacturers to increase our appreciation of the ridiculous actual product. In return, I pointed out that the Oriental string lights that we purchased on the Asian street had standard American plugs, an inconvenient mismatch with the predictably Vietnamese outlets in our apartment. Sabotage! We had to use the adapter off the master bedroom television set (which came with the apartment and also has US plugs, don't ask me why), but our tree's twinkling away charmingly now, so it must have all worked out eventually. [Cavin]