Adventures

This evening my sister and I had adventures.

We and Deba were going to go watch "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" tonight, the 8:50 showing, and the six-something showing had sold out. So we opted to go buy the tickets early.

But before we got tickets, we had to go get a Young Life discount card from Deba because that way you get the matinee price. Deba was babysitting up in the Quemazon development. Now, this is new since the fire, built up on the side of the mountain and full of really gorgeous houses and twisty roads named things like "Sinuoso" and "Esperanza." If I had a spare million dollars I'd want one of those houses. Anyway, this development being fairly new I don't know my way around it. The soror knows her way rather better, but she didn't know the family Deba was sitting for.

So first we take the wrong turn off Diamond and have to go back and find the right road. Managed that. We turned into the development all right (it's labeled QUEMAZON in black letters on a cliff 20 feet tall, so that was good) and couldn't quite remember the address. We thought it was on Bertha del something road. She asked what dels roads were named after, and the only one I could think of right offhand was Commedia dell'arte, which we were pretty sure it wasn't. We get there and find Brisa del Something--Sol, maybe?--and go, aha! That's it!

But now the question is WHICH house on Brisa del Sol. It's supposed to have Deba's brother's truck in front of it. But it's his new truck, so we aren't entirely sure. We drive all the way up Brisa del Sol, amuse ourselves with all the street names, express the desire to be named Esperanza de la Vega, come back down Quemazon in Grandma Low gear because it's so steep, and determine which truck is probably Deba's brother's. We park behind it. Right.

Unfortunately, the truck that's probably Deba's brother's is parked between two houses. And each house is actually three townhouses smooshed together. So we call Deba's brother's cell phone, reasoning that if she's got his car she might have his phone too. Well, he answered. So we ask him if he knows the address where Deba is. He doesn't. We ask whether the truck is his. He sort of describes it. We read the license plate to him. He doesn't know his license plate. Sigh.

So the sister says she'll just go knock on the door and if it's the wrong house, ask them where the family lives! But one last time before she gets out--oh, it's raining, a steady soggy Virginian rain unlike anything normal for here--she looks for the paper she wrote the address on. Eureka! Yay! We are in more or less the right spot and now we know which house too.

The sister goes to the door. She goes in. A bit later she reappears with a Young Life card, cash for Deba's ticket, and a big piece of notepaper that had been taped to the front door, addressed to her. "Just come on in, I'm giving the kids a bath."

We went and bought tickets. They were not sold out. They weren't close to being sold out, though (the girl said) you never know if they will be. It just depends on if lots of people feel like staying up late.

On the way back, the traffic lights were having issues: they kept turning red on us. When this happens, there are two responses in our family. The first is the comment, "Life is tedious." The second is to try and cajole the light into turning green. You can ask nicely. You can wave your hand and go, "Green, green, green!" You can point at it like Spiderman and say, "Go, web, go!" You can insult it in Spanish (which we tried to do--or rather, I lapsed into ungrammatical Latin, things like "malo lumen").

At one point, the standard approaches weren't working, so the sister yelled, "BLUE!" And it turned green! That traffic light is having an identity crisis!