bamboo killin' sure is thrillin' (and so is the new Potter movie)...

Eor's showing his friend his new speakers and music setups, so I might have time to write. :)

Yesterday we rolled ourselves out of bed shortly before 8am and went out to attack bamboo (Japanese knotweed) until my Dad and Aunt Sigh should show up. Got rained on, but it wasn't really something I minded; it kept us cool. :) I think they arrived around 11am? By which time we were completely covered with mud, so we changed, showed them around the condo, and then took a leisurely walk up around the corner to the Broad Arrow Tavern - expensive but good.

My Dad, though... "Can you read this menu?" he asked Eor, after peering at it through his glasses for a while and giving up.

"It's not easy with this script."

"They have fish and chips, Dad."

"Okay. That's exactly what I want."

"They also have buffalo burgers."

"Nope. I want the fish and chips."

Later on, though, Dad was picking away at his food, and Eor asked him, "You getting the best of that fish? Or is it getting the best of you?"

"There ain't no best to this fish," he declared.

After lunch Aunt Sigh had a short nap while Dad, Eor and I chatted, then we showed them the property. Our neighbors stopped and talked with us a bit, and it seems they have a theory that we are actually pandas, and bought into this property because we wanted the bamboo. :) Later, when I showed Aunt Sigh that in fact the young shoots ARE edible (they taste a little like rhubarb, if you can stand to eat rhubarb straight), she said we really needed to wander back up to the house with all of us chewing on shoots. We're a whole family of disguised pandas. :)

Then Dad had a nap while Aunt Sigh and I wandered up along the main street and she tried on some sneakers. She said she'd badly needed that nap because the ride down, with him driving, was so tense. He's blind in one eye and doesn't see too well out of the other (can't read a menu even with his glasses!) and I had got after him about driving when we'd talked on the phone the night before. ("You're just saying these things because you don't think I drive well enough." "Well, yeah!" "Why do you think that?" "Because I've seen you drive, recently, and it wasn't good!" "I just do that to scare you.") She decided she would drive back. The original plan was that she would stay down with us for a few days, but she couldn't bear to think of him driving back by himself any more than I could.

And then we went to see Harry Potter, which experience Eor wrote about much better than I can do. :) It's time for bed, now, anyway.