Feeding

monshu was so cute just now. Right before he left on his errands, he asked me, "Will you be here when I get back?" And I was like, "Dude, it's MLK Day." He confessed to me yesterday that he's still working out the bugs in his schedule. He started out with the notion that all the stuff he used to fit into the weekends he was now free to do whenever he wants. The houseplants beg to differ.

Yesterday was our big social day, starting with brunch at Royal Coffee. When we went there for crêpes last year, I remember noticing the breakfast special and bookmarking it as a place to return to. Only took me nine months! The others seemed quite happy with their french toast and Ethiopian eggs, but I got a fiery surprise with my fūl. At the Peacock Café, where I was introduced to it, it was essentially a fava bean porridge will all seasonings--berbere, minced onions, green peppers, etc. on the side so you could mix them to taste. This version was whole beans in a spicy sauce. Very tasty, but I wanted to nap later, so I filled up on injera and only nibbled at them, taking most home for the GWO's lunch today.

With a storefront church right next door, I was concerned they'd be crowded on a Sunday morning. Far from it. The empty space was taken up with the booming of a televangelist's voice until Scruffy politely asked the server to turn down the tv. At first we had one conversation going, but then he and I went back to our ongoing conversation about our tastes in comedy while monshu filled in Alex the Great on his experience of retirement. It was their first time meeting each other, and it seemed to go rather well.

In the evening, the Old Man finally got to use his gift certificate to jinju, with which we treated Diego and Uncle Betty. I told Diego later that, no matter how many of his crazy Growing Up Mormon stories I've heard, he always manages to come up with more. This time I learned out his crazy cousins who set fires and practiced shooting targets INSIDE THE HOUSE (an eleven-bedroom monster that was converted into a nursing home when they moved out). In talking of teens, Uncle Betty and I found that we had similar stories of being bright kids from backwards schools who got thrown into elite competitive environments and succeeded. In the bus heading home, I asked "How many people do we know who we could spend three hours chatting with and hardly notice time passing?" I'm a big talker, but still it's a damn short list.