Parent's House

We went to my parent's house this weekend. Truth told, I could've done without it. They should be thankful for Rebekah because she always twists my arms until I consent to visiting. I am not a very family oriented person.

So we went down on Friday after I got off from work. It is a two and half hour drive which was made tolerable by the new Club 8 CD I got in the mail.

In order to get to my parent's house you have to descend down this windy rock road that weaves through thick trees. They have this country house with a creek that runs by their house.

Saturday I woke up and drove into the nearest town to waste time because there is literally nothing to do at my parents. Rolla is a college town; however, unlike other college towns there is absolutely nothing going on. No coffee-houses with psudeo-intellectual ramblings. No rock clubs. No record stores. No anti-war protesting. It's weird. I suppose because it is an engineering school that the majority of the enrollment is foreigners who stick to themselves and do foreign things after-hours and on the weekend in their little foreign communities.

In Rolla the only thing to do is to go to Super Wal-Mart. In all honesty there are hicks that take their girlfriends on dates there. Since it is hunting season practically everyone, man, woman, and child had their camouflage on. As if to suggest that they had to blend in and be ready lest some twelve-point buck jumps out from behind an underware rack.

I went to this pawn shop and Rebekah and I found this case which said 'yamaha piano' on the price tag. We tried to open it to see what was in it but one of the latches wouldn't budge. The 16-year old granddaughter of the owner came over and spent a good fifteen minutes trying to jimmy the latch open until finally it clicked.

It turned out to be a Yamaha CP-30 electric piano. It was neat and would've looked awesome on stage. The price-tag said $250 which was more than I had to give for it. However the owner told us we could have it for $150. I'm really looking for a combo organ or string-synth right now but the price made me consider getting it. We probably would've but the the thing weighed 100lbs and was much too big to fit in our little car so we opted out of it.

The girl was pretty nice and made me jealous when she said that she had a lot of guitars at her house. That her grandfather just let her take home whatever she liked. Rebekah asked whether or not she was in a band. She said that she didn't play guitar she just liked to hang them on her wall.

My brother and his wife were coming over for a weiner roast that afternoon so we went back to my folk's house. He is into indian artifacts and was hiking up to a nearby cave to sift for arrowheads. Mina lamented that she never gets to see "feather indians" just "dot indians" which was comical. I went with him for part of the way with Rebekah and Mina. The walk to the cave takes you through a big pasteur with woods on one side and a bluff-face on the other. It felt like Lord of the Rings and I could just imagine these big epic helicopter camera shots as Rebekah and I ran through the field recited lines from the movies and dodging cow crap. It's easy to be geeky when you're in the middle of nowhere.

That night we had a fire. Rebekah made the chili I mentioned a coupled days ago. I discovered how versatile it is. I ate it as chili-mac and then used it on a campfire hot-dog and then used it as tortilla chip dip. Mmmmmm chili. We rented the "Mighty Wind" DVD and I enjoyed watching it again as well as the deleted scenes.

Sunday I woke up and went to their meeting. There was a chinese sister there named "Ang Lee" and everytime she got called on I laughed because I kept thinking about the movie director. They have a chinese study group at the hall because they get a lot of interest from the chinese student community. Most of the kids are atheists and they study simply to learn English.

After the meeting we went to my brother's house for chicken and then back home...