Wednesday

The esoteric title of today's post is "Um, they aren't fighting." It's something I said today. Today we went to the mail room where Sunshine needed my help to haul home three boxes we finally received. On the way to the embassy, I drew a Wild Joker from some sandy excess on the corner of Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai and Hai Bà Trưng Streets, where there is a lot of construction. Added to the house hand (Ten, Five, and Ace) this places the City much closer to actually beating my trip Fours in this round.* Mail hasn't run this way, from Hong Kong, since the day before Christmas eve. My mother, Sunshine's parents, and our good friends had all sent boxes of stuff for Christmas that probably would have arrived before New Year's if the FPO hadn't shut down between these two major end-of-the-year holidays. Ergo, we had Christmas Two this evening. We struck up the trees again and everything. Nice. Mom's box was filled with wrapped packages: a watch, a camera, two pairs of shoes, two funny velour elf costumes. Sunshine's parents had forwarded gifts from her grandparents: books and sand dollars. From friends we got a wonderful purse,* some romantic Grecian olive oil, some miraculously intact candy canes, and a CD full of Christmas songs we played while we were unwrapping everything. It was great, this second Christmas, this extension of our faraway holiday. Somewhere in the middle we walked down the street to eat a Vietnamese dinner at Miss Kim, just a couple of blocks down our road. On the way, Sunshine spied two geckos facing off on the off-white wall guarding one of the nearby construction sites. They rammed each other, and then they tangled. "Oh wow, they're really fighting," Sunshine declared happily. [Cavin]