International food for Christmas

Four years ago we decided to start a new family tradition of allowing our middle son to choose where he wants to eat when we go out for his Christmas Eve birthday. It is sometimes difficult to find a place open on Christmas Eve, but since he likes trying different international food, that makes it easier actually. Many years ago we were visiting my mother in Tucson for Christmas and we could only find a single restaurant open. It was a Mexican food and that started the idea I think. Four years ago when living in San Antonio, Texas he came up with a great idea of eating Thai food. My coworkers pointed us to what many considered the best Thai food in the city. It was definitely a treat to take all of the family to that place. After returning to North Carolina the following year, our son decided he wanted to try Sushi. He knew it was not my favorite so he found a place that served both Thai and Sushi. Last year was difficult as we called so many places that he wanted to try but they were all closed. We found some other interesting places but they were too expensive like the "Melting Pot" which serves only fondu. So we decided on Greek food, which was a great choice. This year we went for Thai food again and it was wonderful. Who knows what next year will hold? At least we decided not to get ice cream cake this year as we have not had much success with those in the last few years. The photo on the right is the straw covers from our Thai ice tea which were mysteriously formed in beautiful rose shapes. The rice served for our curry dishes was also interesting as one was the shape of a teddy bear and the other one was a fish. Such a great place to eat. It was called Sawasdee.

Famly Painting

For my wife's birthday this year, I had a movie poster artist in India paint the children through a friend of mine who is living in India. This is the resulting painting which is 6 ft x 4ft.

18th Greek birthday

Yesterday was our middle son's 18th birthday. We try to eat out so my wife does not have to cook a special meal for both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We have eaten in several different places. One year while in Arizona visiting my mother in Tucson, we searched everywhere to find some place open where we could eat. We finally found an authentic Mexican restaurant that was open and enjoyed the food a lot. One year while in San Antonio we ate at the best Thai restaurant in the whole city. It is the best Thai food I have ever eaten. This year, our son wanted to eat traditional southern cooking, but we could not find a place that was open. We decided at the last minute to eat Greek food. I had heard people at work talk about two of the best Greek places to eat. The one closest to work was not open so we picked the other one. We were a bit sceptical when we arrived at the restaurant as no one else was there, but we were early since we wanted to attend the Christmas Eve service at church later in the evening. It was fun eating something none of us had had in an authentic restaurant. We topped off the meal with one of the best desserts any of us had eaten, which was a raspberry cream cake. It came with a single candle on it. The name of the place was Mythos Mediterranian Bistro.

Do you want to be a teenager?

Like The Last of the Mohicans or Custard's Last Stand or The Last Samurai, there comes a time for the final big event. Today is just such a day in our family as the youngest child is becoming a teenager. Of course there will be another big day in the not so distance future when we no longer have any teenagers, but we have to wait seven more years for that event. I am trying to remember this same day for each of our children, when they crossed the teenager line, but it is difficult to do so. Not different in a sentimental way, but a huge event like this seems big at the time but then later on it seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things or the current worries of the day. I am sure it was a big deal for me when I turned 13; however, how it seems like the day never existed. What I do remember of being a teenager causes me to never want to be one again!

However, today we will live in the moment and enjoy the time with our daughter and her six young friends. That is why we will quickly shuffle them into the Acoustic Shed to let them go wild and be noisy while we get a good night's sleep. Oh the benefits of the multiple purpose sound proof shed are all becoming clear now.

Akbar to 81

This was an interesting weekend as this time of year we celebrate the combined birthdays of my wife's father and my daughter, since their birthdays are only a couple of days apart. Before leaving for Wilmington, we started the weekend off by seeing the newest Indian movie called Jodhaa Akbar. Indian movies are so fascinating to me as they always seem to have an interesting point or are pure entertainment without bad language or sexual content. This was a movie of epic proportions - I am so thankful to have a wife who enjoys going with me as that makes it even more enjoyable.

I don't know what happened on the drive down to the beach city of Wilmington as I slept almost all of the way. Happily I was not driving! Once we arrived, my daughter was treated like royalty as usual. I think that is why she wants to stay longer when it is time to return. We had a few laughs over presents and times of reminiscing of life in South Korea for the Dietrick family. Then the subject of computers came up of which I quickly become the family expert. In the morning I tried to fix my wife's father's five year old laptop.

He was complaining about how slow it was and how he had no disk space left. I first looked at his Recycle Bin and noticed it was almost 1 GB. When I looked at the contents I saw it had never been empty since 2002 when he bought it. I am still amazed at how unintuitive computers can be to someone's who career is not working with them. After running Disk Cleanup, and cleaning up the trash can, the space was still not coming back. I then found a utility called Folder Size, and it pointed me right to the problem of 6 GB of temporary files on main windows folder. Then I found out that with all of the programs installed recently the disk was badly fragmented. When I checked Windows Task Manager, I found out that 400 MB of memory was allocated but only 204 MB of memory was installed. We went out trying to find matching memory and after visiting every store we could find we had nothing to show for it. In the last store the man was so helpful that he said we could substitute other memory for the one I was looking for, but they were out. We went back to the next to last store that we had visited and found another person to help us. He located memory we needed and once back home it actually worked! In the end, he had a computer with 7 GB more free and 640 MB of memory and a laptop he could actually use! This was my birthday present for him and it was greatly appreciated by the newly crowned 81 year old patriarch of the family.

not the week we planned

This weekend we had a great plan all setup. My mother was supposed to come from Arizona for my sister's 50^th birthday. We were going to drive up to the motherland, beautiful Virginia, for a getaway weekend. Sometimes you just cannot plan for the chain of events that occur.

Last weekend I took our van to get the oil changed and in anticipation of the big weekend I wanted to be all set. I told the Meineke man that I had seen stains on the driveway and to make sure the leaks did not come from our van. When I checked back in with him after an hour, he showed me how the radiator had a crack in it. I asked for a quote on the work and he said $850. That was odd to me since a couple of years ago I had the radiator fixed in my son's car for $400. I immediately went to a good friend who has his own car mechanic shop and asked him to check it for me. He told me I was the first person to complain about the high price at Meineke and he would find out the cost and get back with me on Monday. Sure enough, he quoted a little over $400. Since I was taking off from work on Friday, we scheduled that day for van radiator overhaul knowing I would be all set for the weekend trip to Virginia. One other odd thing about radiators... In the good old days you could fix radiators by pouring a solution into them and it would clog the small leaks in no time. These days of advanced technology, radiators are plastic, which means if the crack you have to replace them. When you get a crack the cold to hot temperature changes make them fail even faster. Sounds like progress to me. Except for the fact that plastic is lighter, but then again our van gets 14 miles/gallon, so I am not sure that lighter radiator is helping.

On Tuesday night my mother called and said she saw the forecast for ice and snow and extremely low temperatures and cancelled her flight. Which was pretty disappointing, but she had a cold recently and was afraid the cold might trigger more sickness. Our well intended plans were starting to fall apart.

On Wednesday our dishwasher stopped working. We had this same thing happen a couple of years ago and when I tried to find someone to fix it, they all told me to forget it as the dishwashers are self contained and it was cheaper to buy a new one that fix an existing one. And guess what? The dishwasher is plastic! Two plastic failures in the same week. We let the completely full dishwasher sit, until Friday. I took off the water line to check to make sure the water was flowing, which it was, so it was indeed the motor inside the plastic housing. I turned off the hot water shutoff value and sat down to read the newspaper. My daughter came down to cook her morning eggs and yelled to me to come over as water was flowing on the kitchen floor. I opened the cabinets under the sink and saw a lake had formed, which I cleaned up quickly. I thought that was odd, but checked the hot water line and it was indeed off. I left the find a new water hose, just in case the one had a leak in it. The odd thing was the length from the hot water line to the dishwasher was 10 feet. They only make dishwasher cords in 4 and 6 foot lengths. It took 4 stores to find the connections I needed to get it to work with a 10 foot ice maker cord. When I got back my daughter again told me a flood was happening in the kitchen. I checked the hot water shutoff value again and this time being wiser, I turned on the sink faucet cold water and saw water pouring out of the hot water dishwasher connection, which was plastic of course, connected to a PVC plastic water line. The custom builder who built our house liked to make sure everything was custom built!

On Saturday morning we picked up our fixed van for the bargain price of $420 and thanks to our corrupt Meineke shop, my friend had made some money. Since snow and ice were in the weather forecast we put off our trip to Virginia for one more day. Now that we had a van we could go find a new dishwasher. My wife and I checked every store we could find as we typically like to buy scratch-n-dent or discontinued high ticket items. We found a high end model normally selling for $498 which was marked down to $298, which was cheaper than almost any other one we could find. We brought it home and when I tried to install it I found that the connectors I got the day before were not right. Off to my favorite home improvement store as there was a plumber who worked there who had always helped me in the past. He fixed me up and by 8:30pm last night I had the dishwasher working. The place we bought it said the really high end dishwashers are stainless steel and are very quiet, we chose the quiet plastic model because of cost!

This morning we woke up to my daughter vomiting, which she has continued for 3 hours. Sounds like that seals our Virginia plans. What sounded like such a good idea has not worked out and we are $750 poorer as well. What a week!

food and family

It is almost impossible to get our whole family together at this stage in every one's lives, but for my wife's birthday we came close. Since my wife was born and grew up her whole life in South Korea, she really likes Asian food, so we went to P.F. Chang's. I had always heard that it was a very expensive Chinese restaurant, which it was, but the atmosphere was really great for such special occasions, plus I did not have to pay for the bill so it was even more special! My wife's parents, my wife's sister and a really good friend of theirs as well as our children were all present. My oldest son is currently a waiter at another lesser food establishment so he could appreciate the high cost which means high tips and even said he would like to work at a place this nice. This is the first event in the series of landmarks for this year and hopefully they will all be as nice as this one. The older you get, the more the events themselves are not the focal point, but who is present to share them with you and this is why this one was so special.

Speaking of my waiter son, he rode is the car with us and as we talked I realized how much he has become responsible in the last four months. Can I dare say matured? For me, the idea of becoming mature means taking the responsibility you have been given and using it wisely. I see in the American Heritage Dictionary they define maturity as "The state or quality of being fully grown or developed". I am not sure when I can say any of my kids are fully grown mentally, but he is definitely on the path to getting there. I think life should be about getting better with age and learning new things all along the way, so I guess I will never fully achieve this goal either, which is good. The other good thing about my son is that is he learning what he is not good at doing, which is just as important as knowing what you like to do. This for me also is maturing.

To end the day, our two youngest children huddled on the floor in our bedroom to watch a 2004 Bollywood movie called Bride & Prejudice with us. We had all four watched this together before and the kids liked the line "no life without wife" so they did not mind seeing it again. It was nice to have them watch it with us as who knows how many more times this will happen as it is not "cool" to watch Indian movies with your parents.