The hot pot was a success. I still put a raw egg in my bowl and now I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t have. I’ve had stomach cramps off and on since dinner. Mr. W scored major brownie points by bringing a bottle of strawberry champagne (my mom doesn’t like the taste of regular champagne) to ring in the new year, plus a magnetized algae scraper for my dad’s fish tank. Right now he’s showing off his techie side by giving my parents a tutoring session on the software he just installed on my mom’s new laptop. I’ve snuck away upstairs to play on my dad’s desktop. It was so funny. After I installed GoogleTalk on my mom’s laptop, my dad came upstairs to sign in to his account so that they could plug in their respective microphones and IM each other voice. “Now we can chat with each other!” my dad said happily to my mom. I could just picture it now. It’d be like 2:30 a.m. and my dad would be dozing downstairs in front of the TV in the family room, when suddenly, the drone of some infomercial is drowned out by my mom’s voice blaring from the laptop on the coffee table. “Too noisy! Come to bed!” she’d hiss in that sleepy irrate voice that all moms have when they awake from slumber to yell at you.

Turns out that the printer/copier/scanner doesn’t include a printer cable, so we’ll have to come back some other time to set up the printer and to link it to a network so that all the computers in the house may print. Good thing those old people downstairs get along. 😀

Oops, gotta go…my mom realized I was missing and is now calling me downstairs to look at their photos from their Sedona trip on her new laptop.