holiday spirit

On Friday I had to walk at the mall by myself.  Joy was nice enough to join me on the phone.  The stores have been opening early so it was pretty crowded by the time I was leaving.  Do you know what this means?  My parking space was a fairly hot commodity.  So hot, in fact, that a man was willing to wait for me to unbuckle baby, put him in his car seat, fold up my stroller, get everything stashed, etc.  I know!  I tried to hurry.  Unfortunately, I had to exit the parking lot in the same direction he was in so he had to wait until I was all the way out and then out of NOWHERE a car zoomed into my space from behind me.  The man that had been waiting (for quite some time) started honking at him, but the new car did not care one whit!  I felt so bad and wished that I could have accommodated the patient waiter a bit more by, I don't know, ramming into the other guy, for example.  As I was exiting the parking lot, I saw them involved in a heated exchange, but the new guy didn't move.  Wouldn't you totally not park there if you saw that someone had been waiting?  And then if you hadn't noticed, but someone tried to alert you to that fact, wouldn't you just let them park there?   Aaaah, the Christmas Cheese, I mean Season.  While we were in Japan, we would always try to figure out what the topic of our church meetings were.  One Sunday a man, talking in very rapid Japanese, kept repeating the same phrase "kurisumasu chizu" was what I heard.  I turned to Matthew and said, "I think the first word is Christmas and the second word is either cheese or map."  It wouldn't have surprised me if there was some Japanese christmas cheese tradition that I had never heard of, after all the entire country has been convinced by KFC that everyone eats fried chicken on Christmas Eve whilst waiting for Santa.  Or perhaps it was a story about finding something using a map.  I didn't know.  Finally, 20 minutes later we realized he had been saying Christmas season the whole time, but now I always think Christmas Cheese.  Probably had to be there.


No I am not packed.  In case you were wondering.  Everyone seems to have been wondering.  For the past six weeks.  Let's see where we are next week at this time.