my parents seem to have normal friends. the dinner was fine, though our original plan to drive separately did get vetoed. and we had a bit of an adventure finding their house...i felt like chevy chase and family searching for wallyworld. it was a little ridiculous how long it took us to find the house. note to self: check address and directions online - do not rely on dad's sense of direction. when we got there, it turned out to be more than just a few people...it was like a whole phatty party of adults - and their kids got to stay home. we made nice with the kids of the host friends and watched some football and 2+ hours of the iron chef - and as fun as the iron chef is, it might have been one episode too much. [i'm definitely securing the two vehicles thing next time.] and my big nagging fear that this was just another ploy of my parents to marry me off turned out to be unfounded. hooray! the dinner host family had three boys - high schooler, 5th year college kid, and college grad. so, we weren't subjected to odd conversations by the adults - we had the kiddie table.

the guy in college actually goes to rice down in texas and he actually knows the people that i went to high school with who went to rice - talk about small world. and the grad was an almost prototype asian kid who played some musical instrument and was in the PYP so he knew my neighbors tim and alan. trippy. and they were really into the food network - i had no idea that channel had such a following :)

and in another weird turn of small world events - the mom of some guys i sort of knew from high school was at the dinner, along with aunty margaret and uncle phillip from the church i went to when i was in jr high/high school, before i left for college. it was like the randomest gathering. but all in all, it wasn't the nightmare that i envisioned it to be, so it was like a pleasant evening.