Dear Mom & AssalamuAlaikum Dad& Z1 & Fuzzy & Zaymun & Oleo Corpoleo & Blogistan

I’ve only got half an hour to type (those are the rules down here at the Barret Memorial Library, Petersburg, IN) so I hope you guys forgive me for combining  four separate letters with this one blog entry. 

We’ve been in Indiana since Sunday.  Z1 (the big bro) drove us down as far as Uncle Rusty’s house, where we sat on the sofas and hung out with cousins we hadn’t seen for about four years.  A note about my Uncle Rusty, he loves Pakistani food.  Sometimes I wonder whether he’s related to us from my mother’s side at all, or whether he’s actually a displaced Chacha (brother of my father) who somehow ended up in Indiana.  We brought him a tub of Nihari and a tub of Biryani. (Note to Fuzzy: That biryani was Delicious with a capital D.) 

We also met two Mormon missionaries who were at Uncle Rusty’s house for lunch.  My Momma used to feed the missionaries every Sunday, so it was a very nostalgic experience for us to see the fresh-faced, well-intentioned, but too-young-to-be-too-brilliant missionaries with the black name-tags and back-packs.  

After good-bye hugs and one good-bye squeeze from my Uncle that fractured at least three of my ribs, we jumped in G-ma’s little red car and finished the rest of the eight-hour drive catching up.  We’ve been here for the last five days, baking cookies, eating G-ma’s famous tuna casserole and zipping about southern Indiana.  We’ve also been mildly productive, we broke G-ma’s bathtub spigot.  Then we replaced it.  That was exciting.  It involved a few trips up to the hardware store in town where a nice man humored our questions and guided us through the painfully silly process of installing a new spigot.

1. Buy new spigot.  (the hardware store is only twenty minutes away)
2. Remove old spigot.  (bang bang bang. ok, now what?)
3. Place threads of spigot onto pipe. (it isn’t fitting!  Back to the hardware store, STAT!) 
4. Place threads of adjusted spigot (the hardware man took an extra rubber bushing off) onto pipe.
5. Turn spigot clockwise.  (which way is clockwise?)
6. Oh, that way, he he.
7. Enjoy.  (whee! Showers for everyone!)

Other adventures here at G-ma’s house have included a trip up to Hornady Park, the beautiful green pond & park where we spent the halcyon days of or youth torturing each other on the teeter-totter (mooOOOooom, she won’t let me dooOOOoown!) and feeding the ducks.  Well, more than ducks actually.  First there were the red-faced thingies that looked like ducks but hissed like snakes when you didn’t crank those crackers our fast enough.  Then there were these white things that looked like ducks but honked like geese and ate like pigs.  There were one or two proper ducks, cute little things trailing cute little ducklings, but they were muscled out of the way by the several proper geese, three-feet tall and mean-tempered.  When they opened their beaks you had a choice, you could fill the beak with crackers of you could suffer The Wrath.  We tossed the crackers and ran.

We plan on having an adventure later today, but right now we’re doing laundry.  Rather, G-ma and Owlie are doing laundry at the Laundromat while Abez, Minister of Miscommunications, is here at Barret Memorial Library, where incidentally, her time is up.

Well Blogistanis, we hope to post some pictures after we get back to Chicagoistan and develop the film.  More coming later, but how much later is unsure.  G-ma doesn’t have internet access.


Love, Peace and Salan Grease,

   Abez
Computer C2
Barret Memorial Library
Petersburg, IN

posted by Abez @ 7/29/2004 09:27:00 PM