Sunday

Day 7, church day, day of rest - Sunday is all of these.

We'll make it to church at noon today. The heat will be excessive but there's no way to get Ian up right now, even though it's 9:10 in the morning. We'd have to be in the car, oh, right now. Just not happening. Jonathon put in his library pick for the week, Land Before Time 2, and we'll do the "day of rest" bit right now.
Poker and Rickshaws.
Poker night on Friday lasted until midnight. Ian was one of twelve players, split between two tables, and ended the evening at third place. I heard all about how the cards just didn't come through for him. Uh huh. Over Chez Nous, kids congregated for the four hours of play while a few moms hung out in the living room chatting away. Weird Al's DVD of classic videos arrived in the mail and kept the 11 monsters occupied for well over an hour while Nicholas and I roasted some marshmallows to share, and popcorn littered the carpet. The kids are always asking to play Harry Potter Scene It, so they played with their friends until after 10. At the end we had two left playing XBox360 Lego Star Wars. Everyone crashed hard at midnight.
Last night we participated in the 2007 Chennai Rickshaw Scavenger Hunt Challenge. Armed with a list of clues, we found an autorickshaw and the driver even spoke moderately good English. Driving all over town in 90+F heat, with 1/2 a backside hanging out the "window" is something everyone should do. Just once. We had items to find - from figuring out George H.W. Bush's talking point (the Thousand Lights mosque) to the statue of Gandhi at the beach, and challenges to complete like playing cricket with the boys on the beach and crashing a wedding. Everything was proven by digital photo of the team members (and for more points the auto driver). Some were physically easy but hard to track down - the "One Family, One Child"/"We Two, Us One" written on the backs of trucks as India's answer to the population issue. Some were easy to find but more difficult to complete - how do you get a traffic cop to let you direct traffic with him? Some we never figured out - a restaurant where you don't want to step on crabs? And some we just made up as we went along. A hug from the Prime Minister would have won us the race but like all the teams we chose to stage a hug with a billboard picture. Unfortunately we chose to to do in front of the Secretariat and incurred the wrath of a frightening woman with a walkie talkie.
The Burning Rubbers (use your imagination on what our "costume" was) returned sweaty, dirty, with the smell of exhaust in our hair. But we all looked and felt about the same. Nope, we didn't win as some of the task locations were closed by the time we arrived and others had planned better, but we had a good time and Brian got the number of the auto driver. He was quite patient driving us all over for three straight hours and pulling over at the drop of a hat. Our highlight was getting caught in a wedding procession. We may not have a photo of one of our grubby selves with the bride and groom but we did get a groom parading in on his horse surrounded by turbanned men and followed by women in all their finery. That and eating a snack on the beach. MMmmmm.
The worst part was the pre-race tequila shot. It was Cinco de Mayo so tequila is part and parcel of a party. I've never taken a shot of anything before and will avoid doing so in the future. Lick salt? Nasty. Tequila, gross and painful. The lime was the best part, I could have eaten a bowl of limes. Sparky's food for dinner wasn't bad either, and we all watched slide shows of our photo captures while munching tacos and enchiladas.
Our weekend. What did you do this weekend?