Weddings and Chicks
We got back from a Memorial Day weekend in DC, and it was a whirlwind weekend. Got into town on Saturday afternoon, had dim sum with the family, and then met up with Anne for dinner that night. Sunday we had pho and got to see Des and Bryan for a bit, and then set off to Vienna (a skip from my parents' place) to see Pam and Joe wed. It was quite a lovely wedding, and while not large, virtually teeming with William and Mary folks.

The most hilarious part of the weekend to me is the new addition to our family: Erik's baby chick. It's a science assignment that the people in his class were assigned one newly hatched baby chick a few weeks before the end of school. I suppose it's a lesson in caring for other living things and not being an asshole. Part of the "test," apparently, is whether your baby chick follows you when you walk. And the other part of the test is whether your baby chick is still breathing after the few weeks, since if your baby chick kicks the bucket there goes a fifth of your entire grade. But the kicker is that it's very, very easy for your baby chick to bite the bullet. It can toddle off of tables. It can drown in its own water dish (hence the need to purchase beautifully colored marbles to fill said dish). It is astonishingly easy to step on when it runs under feet. We watched the baby chick eat lint off the carpet (Erik: "It loves eating lint.")--that can't be good for it. It demands 90 degree temperatures to thrive.

(side note: luckily for the baby chick the 90 degree temperature was in full bloom since the upstairs air conditioner broke before it arrived. Don't worry, Erik was comfortable since he sleeps in the icy cool basement. Todd and I got to sleep upstairs in the moist, warm baby-chick inducive temperatures, though. It was awesome).

The baby chick is damn cute (refer to pictures), but it is also loud. It chirps endlessly, but the chirp is so plaintive and never-ending that it more resembles a bleat. And the bleat is all the more strident when it realizes that it has been left alone in the room. You can seriously hear this pathetic, constant cry ring throughout the whole of my parents' house. I was housed next door to the baby chick, so I was awoken by its cries at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning. Awesome!