Oklahoma Adventure Part II, et al

Well, shoot. I procrastinate updating for a few days and now I have a million more things to update about. Hope you're feeling like reading a lot today...

First and foremost, a comparison:

Dane

Me

My Dad

Do you see a resemblance? A couple of things are apparent. First, the Hood genes are strong. Second, I am apparently male-looking. Ha.

To fill you in on what I did while I was in Oklahoma, keep in mind that Dane was sick, so I wasn’t able to do too much. But we had fun nonetheless. The night I arrived, we had a little birthday party for Rika, and I was introduced to the Wii. This would lead to many more hours of fun. The next day, we did some shopping and went down to Norman to see Rika and Brady’s apartment. There I learned that I am not very good at Guitar Hero. Rika and Brady came back to Edmond to hang out and spend the night. The next day was filled with more shopping, and this is when Dane began to seem sick. Poor little guy. He was so miserable. Because Dane was sick, I wasn’t able to go to church and show him off. He had a fever and the runniest nose you’ve ever seen (unless you saw Joel this weekend). I figured it was just a cold he caught on the plane, but we took him to an Ear Nose Throat doctor in my parents’ ward just in case. He helped me feel a little more at ease knowing that it wasn’t an ear infection.

That night, I was visited by a house elf. Dane wouldn’t sleep in the pack and play, so he was sleeping in his car seat next to my bed with one small blanket so he wouldn’t overheat. I also had a humidifier going to help him breathe. When Dane woke up for the first of many times that night, I went to get him out of the car seat and discovered another blanket on him. “How did this blanket fall on him?” I wondered. I comforted him and put him back to go to sleep. A short while later, he woke up again. This time, the humidifier had turned off. I thought, “Maybe it has an automatic shutoff. But it didn’t turn off last night. Weird.” That’s when I noticed several damp hand towels draped around the room. I began to suspect my mom (she’s a big proponent of the draping damp hand towels), but I was sure I would have noticed if she’d come in. She told me later that she came in multiple times; I guess I was too tired to wake up. My mom, the house elf.

On Monday, I was able to see part of Mika’s orchestra concert at OU. I was impressed with how they sounded. Plus, I heard Mika’s little solo as principal cellist. Hooray! At Rika and Brady’s, I attempted more Guitar Hero but again proved my inadequacy. On Tuesday, we celebrated Kenta’s birthday and had a Big Brain Academy Tourney. I made it to the final standoff against Rika, but she prevailed. The prize was a Reese’s Whips candy bar that she didn’t want, so it fell by default to Brady. Ah, the blessings of marriage.

Meanwhile, everyone was getting sick. Rika had already been kind of sick, and she was getting worse. My dad was sick; he probably caught what Dane had. Then Kenta got sick. I’ve always heard that winter was the time to catch colds and the flu, but I always thought people kind of exaggerated because I hadn’t really experienced it. Well, here it was in full glory. I’ll never doubt again.

Wednesday was my last full day. I went on a walk with my dad, and we spent some quality time at home. Some of my siblings had planned on coming back that day, but illness convinced them otherwise. We had Pei Wei’s for dinner, with lettuce wraps. Oh man. The lettuce wraps. They make me so happy.

The next morning was pretty much filled with packing and getting ready to go. I ended up with so much for stuff than I came with. My parents were nice enough to offer to ship some things, but I was embarrassed at how much I had to ship. Once we arrived at the airport, it was pretty heartwrenching to have to deprive my parents of their only grandchild. Luckily, my flight was delayed again, offering them a few more precious moments. Here is a smattering of the fun they had together:

Luckily, they’ll see him again soon when they come out for Kenji’s recital. (I don’t know if that’s still supposed to be a surprise. I’m pretty sure he knows. I’m also pretty sure he doesn’t read my blog.)

Speaking of Kenji, here is a funny story. He’s hanging out in the HFAC, minding his own business, when someone comes up to him and says, “Hi, we just noticed you downstairs and we think you look perfect for a part in my friend’s senior capstone film project.”

“Um. Okay.”

“He’s in high school, and he writes science fiction and likes to draw. Will you come audition?”

“Um. Maybe.” Then, of course, the friends that were with him make him go audition just for laughs. He goes down, and they ask him, “What do you know about the part?”

“Um. He’s in high school, and he writes science fiction and likes to draw.”

“Yes! He also hates his little brother, who loves martial arts.”

“Okay.”

So he reads a few lines of the lamest script he’s ever seen. They have him write out a list of his performing experience, where he puts that he’s performed with Brand X Comedy, he was in his fourth grade production of Oklahoma!, he plays the French Horn (very well), and he can talk like Barry White. All of these things are true. The little, half-Japanese redhead can indeed sounds like Barry White. That makes me laugh.

Anyway, they email him back, telling his he’s perfect for the part. He declines. I told him he’s missing out on his big break, but he doesn’t believe me. I thought that was a great story. And doesn’t this so-called senior capstone sound an awful lot like Napoleon Dynamite? Hm…

Book Tag

I was tagged by Tess. Here are the rules:

Find the book closest to you with at least 123 pages.
Turn to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

I am sitting near our bookshelf, making me equidistant from hundreds of books. I thought this would be a problem until I saw that one had been left on the floor, Mongo: Adventures in trash by Ted Botha.

“Suddenly the whole tone changed,” he says, “and she became extremely defensive and guarded. She said, ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable about that. This isn’t your story anymore.’”

Ooooh. What does it mean??

I tag LJ, Kristen, Melissa, Rachelle, and Laci

Also, I guess I’m supposed to plug a good book I’ve read recently. It is Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I don’t recommend it to everyone because it is definitely a PG-13, but it was remarkably well written. It better be; it won the Pulitzer Prize. I give it a 9.5 out of 10. Here is the first paragraph

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, ‘Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,’ published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes.” Interesting, huh?

Last but certainly not least, I present the first blogged video of Dane. Enjoy!