WEEKEND UPDATE, pt 1

You should've been there. My wife was sworn in along with 4,800 other brand new US Citizens early last Friday. There had to have been over 10,000 guests there, too. It was actually a wonderful job of controlled chaos, and everything went off without a hitch. They repeated the whole thing and swore in another 4,800 in an afternoon session. I heard later that Alanis Morissette and Jane Seymour were also sworn in that day. No, I didn't see them. I didn't even see my wife. We were sitting 40 rows back in the gigantic hallway. We didn't see a thing.

We then celebrated with brunch at IHOP. The line to get in there was nearly as long as the line to get in the LA Convention Center. That must be a killer franchise to own.

The next day was my son's birthday party, and that seemed a lot like controlling chaos, too. My wife was the one dealing with the restaurant people, the bakery shop people and the balloon people, but I was there for everything, also dragging along the baby and Mom. Everything was set up in a hour prior to party time. Somehow that all went well, too. We had around 50 people there. I gave a loving speech, we ate Chinese food, sang Happy Birthday, had cake, then all the invited kids grabbed all the expensive balloons and went home. It was like a second LA riot with all the wild balloon looting happening. A giant valentine balloon display was ripped off the wall. Two big monkey balloons were squickly snatched. My poor son was stuck with crappy leftovers, but he got some gifts to make up for it. I don't know what the final money tally is. My wife guaranteed me we'd make a profit off this, but so far I've got big charges on my MasterCard and nothing to deposit in the bank.

Mom stayed until Tuesday. My folks are downsizing back East. They finally sold their main house and are moving into a smaller house which they've owned and rented for a long time. That's the house I grew up in during my Elementary/Junior High days, so I've got lots of memories there. It's got a big backyard where we played baseball and football. We had a great dog then too. Little pembroke welsh corgi and the best frisbee catcher in the world.

Mom hinted that we could move into the house with them. That'd be nice (if my parents weren't living there). There's a reason I'm 3000 miles away from them, and I'm reminded of it everytime they visit and we're together for a few days. Mom told me, "Your Dad says he's satisfied with his life and has had everything he could want... except to see YOU settled down." Nothing like being continually reminded I'm a shitty, good for nothing, going nowhere daytrader with a wife and baby. That's my wife's job. It's pretty much unbearable when I have to hear it in surround sound.

Of course, I do have a hidden fantasy of moving back in with my folks. "The house is paid off," my mom mentioned more than once. Yeah, saving money would be nice. The fantasy part, though, is we'd all daytrade together. Both are retired. They've stayed busy fixing up their house and putting it on the market. That took 2 agonizing years. They're old. They move slowly. Anyway, my parents are the buttwipes that got me interested in the stock market way back when, buying shares for me in horrendous OTC pennystocks and teaching me how to read the business section so I can watch it not move for 5 years before disappearing into thin air. Mom's got a lot of gio in her, believe it or not. She's a pretty smart cookie at following rules and moving up the corporate ladder, as she did at Chase Manhattan Bank for decades. I think she could be a moderator in 6 months.