A Day In The Life of James

Woke up at 7am this morning.  Five hours of sleep.  Every Sunday morning I defy the law of my 10am wake up time and get my butt up in preparation for our English congregation at EKC.  It was quite silly that the worship set I initially picked was about servanthood and not mother.  It wouldn’t have been good to be singing about servants on Mother’s day, would it?  So I had to change the set after we already practiced with the band.  It’s one of the weeks I feel less comfortable with the worship set I picked, so I needed God’s help this week.  Praise God everything went smoothly.  Now a new “mandate” (that I offered a dissent opinion on) was that we need to incorporate a hymn in our set.  So I picked “I Love You Lord”.  Any song written before 1980 qualifies as a hymn, doesn’t it?

After the service, Karen’s sister Carol called from Hawaii.  It was 8:35am and she needed a church to attend.  The thought of sending her to a black church where she can worship in energy and style did briefly cross my mind, but I quickly dismissed it.  We were in the car and didn’t have access to the internet, and my phone was low on battery.  Which slacker could we call that won’t be at church on Sunday morning?  Hmm…  So we called Jimmy, but he wasn’t home.  Praise God.  Then we realized someone we can count on who definitely will be at home–Allen or Justine.  Justine was able to give us some options, and after eliminating two Church of Christ entries, we were able to find two options for Carol, Chinese Baptist Church and a Chinese Alliance Church in Honolulu.

Then Stella, Carol, Eddie, Karen and I dined at the Malay Satay Hut.  Shueli, our real estate agent and sister at church, came in and was in a hurry.  She grabbed a chair, chatted with us a little, then decided she wouldn’t have time to eat if she sat with us.  She changed tables, sat by herself so she can actually finish her lunch, then came back and chatted a little more and ended up paying for our bill!  Guess we should eat at Malay Satay Hut more often.  I can’t say that Carol and Eddie deserved it, thought, considering they didn’t even know who Shueli was!  😛  Eddie was really excited to order some Bonga Cha Cha desert, which turned out to be some purple goo with yellow sweet potatoes.  After clearing up the confusion, the waitress was nice enough to replace it with what Eddie really wanted, which was some black goo that looked like tar.  Then after a gust of durian wind blew gently toward our direction, we knew it was time to go.

I was supposed to offer U-Haul services with my trusty CRV to Karen’s sister Carol in Hawaii, but apparently neither the source of the merchandise (Esther) nor the delivery destination (Karen’s little sister Keri) knew of this arrangement.  We needed to reschedule my professional moving services to another day.

So with a few hours open, we decided to work on our fence a little bit more.  After just doing a sub-par job yesterday on a section that now flaps like a flag, I decided to exercise more due diligence this time around.  We were able to finish one section before a drop of rain hit my lazy bone, when I called it quits.

That’s also when I realized my atomic clock was slow (no really!), and I was late for a quartet practice for Phoebe’s wedding.  I arrived at Gabe’s, emptied my violin case of its moths, picked up my violin, and produced some sounds that no human being should ever be subjected to.  Clearly I overestimated my 7 years of violin experience.  I guess I should have given weight on the 12 years of inexperience between those 7 years and the present.  I hope Phoebe’s not reading this blog.

Then Karen and I went to Sushi Land for some dinner, where we saw Felicia and someone who she just picked up from the airport.  I put up a smile, said hi, shook hands, then in the next .57 seconds completely forgot her friend’s name.  Oh wait, or was it her relative?  Okay, am I getting old, or just not caring as much?  Clearly I need to work on this.

After going home and calling my mom and grandma to wish them a happy Mother’s Day, we watched some TV.  Karen enjoyed her one episode of Full House, and then we saw a couple of episodes of Project Greenlight.  It’s a reality show that chooses a director and script and shows the process of the movie being made, to be released by Dimension Films.  The director may be brilliant, but he seriously has communication problems.  I seriously wonder if he has ever made contact with humans.  And when he wanted to cast only his family and friends and just rejected everyone else, it made me roll my eyes more times than my wheels rolling on the freeway.  Seeing his struggles with the entire crew made me realize the importance of getting your team on your side in order to get things done.

Anyway, that’s about it.  There’s work tomorrow, and I’m late for my sleep!