The Asian Market

It is hotter than fuck outside. Yesterday was as bad as I've ever seen it. It had to have been 105 and it was humid and there was no breeze at all.

Our friends asked us if we wanted to go eat dim sum with them and I can't ever turn it down, so we did. We went to Ocean Palace which is a huge restaurant at one end of an Asian mall. It used to be great, but I don't think I'll ever go back there again. The service was terrible - even for an Asian restaurant. It was overpriced and the dim sum was mediocre. I'll stick to Kim Son (where we took Inanna) from now on. It's a little pricier, but it's closer to home and their dim sum is way better.

The up side was that we got to wander around the mall. Jethro is completely unimpressed with it because he has been there since he was a kid. I, on the other hand, am always fascinated because there are things there for which I have absolutely no explanation. Each shop is packed to overflow with almost nothing but crap. There is no order to it. They get their shipments in from Asia and just dump them directly onto the floor. This is pure heaven for kids who glory in the digging and scraping, and the unorganized mind which is grateful for the liberation. I admit to taking a certain relish in it, myself. Jethro, being a meticulous sort, prefers to wait patiently while the girls and I start digging.

I said the girls could buy one Hello Kitty item each. After much destruction that was unnoticeable when we left, Gwennie had picked out Hello Kitty gardening tools, and Emma had a Hello Kitty night light that lit up when it was turned on, and glowed in the dark when it was turned off.

I wasn't going to get them anything else, but I saw these three good little girls walk past us with the most adorable parasols. One was blue, the other pink and the other purple. They looked so sweet and dainty that I had instant images of Gwennie and Emma looking similarly picturesque. We found the shop where they sold the parasols. They were pretty cheap - $4 each. Gwennie demanded the pink one, and told Emma she was going to take the purple one. Emma tried to take the pink one and Gwennie stabbed her a little. So much for the chrubs with parasols.

Then we meandered around the grocery store. It smells like ass. They were playing Country Roads over the intercom. I couldn't tell at first if was the regular old-school version or if the Asians had adapted it to their own particular audial frequency. I asked Jethro who said they hadn't and if they had, he wouldn't be the one to admit it.

We didn't do much else. Any major effort on our parts would have resulted in massive ammounts of sweat oozing from our pores, soaking us from hair to soles of feet. Then we would have slipped in the sweat puddles and broken our skulls. But I did get my balls. And they were good.