guests

Mrs. Merrill and Mrs. Neet, two of Mom's Korean friends, have stopped by and are happily chatting in the living room with my father and my aunt. I'm hiding downstairs like the pestilential freak that I am, eating a very late lunch, hawking massive loogies, and tapping out this blog entry. Our thanks to the two ladies for bringing over a load of food (soup, shrimp dinner, and doughnuts). Before I went downstairs to the dungeon, I saw Mom smiling; she's always happy to receive guests, and the good weather outside today is icing on the cake.

Emo and I had gone shopping at a ddeok-jip, i.e., a Korean rice cake house, where we bought a few packages of ddeok as well as one order of ddeokbokgi and one container of hobak-juk (pumpkin or squash porridge). I served Mom some ddeokbokgi and hobak-juk as a sort of second lunch; Emo was worried that Mom hadn't eaten enough at noon.

I can hear how noisy it is upstairs-- a happy noise. That's good. Whatever makes Mom happy is good.


UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Sean came over today; he was here when Emo and I got back from our shopping trip. He helped me prep some hospitality plates for the visitors: chopped Korean pears and US apples. The fruit, plus the ddeok we served, were our ambassadors today.

UPDATE 2: David came over later in the evening. He's been extremely busy, so almost as soon as he arrived, he crawled into a dark corner of the house and went to sleep right away, waking up to eat dinner. The poor guy could probably use about 36 hours' sleep, but he's got work in the morning.


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