Mom and Paul had friends from out of town visiting today, and took them out to lunch. So Sunshine and I decided to take Puppy Gracie down to the doggy beach in Venice. (We forgot to take any photos while we were there.) Gracie was as per usual scared of the larger dogs, but made friendly overtures to the smaller dogs she met along the way. She was also scared of the water, and all in all I suspect Gracie would probably just prefer to skip the doggy beach and stay home and zoom around the house.

On the way home, Sunshine and I stopped at The Frosted Mug for chili dogs. Gracie sat quietly on the bench next to us and enjoyed a french fry, until she saw a fellow walk by who looked (to a dog, apparently, though not to me, except in height and gait) suspiciously like her daddy, Paul, and she went crazy trying to get to him. After a minute when she realized that this person was not Paul, she decided that he must be nearby, and spent the rest of the time trying to get off her leash to go find him.

In the evening, we had a nice steak dinner. After that, it was out to a local sports bar with Uncle Bob and Cousin Bobby for karaoke and buffalo wings. I didn’t care for the karaoke much as it was mostly old folks singing country music, but it was still nice to be out at an entertainment venue.

Now that Sunshine has her green card, I decided that she should have a bank account. Unfortunately, Miss Ashley at Chase was unable to open an account for Sunshine without some document of her home address. Since Sunshine’s name will not be appearing on any of our utility bills or credit card statements or paychecks, the only other option was to get her a Social Security card. So from the bank we went to the Social Security office and applied for a Social Security card. (Took a while. Note to self: Go early to the S.S. office next time — before noon.) We should have that within 2 weeks.

From the bank, Sunshine and I drove the 45 minutes back down to Port Charlotte to go to the Asian market there. After meeting with all those nice Filipino folks at church yesterday, they told us that there are four different Asian markets in Port Charlotte. I just googled “Asian Market, Port Charlotte” and followed the map. The place we wound up at was excellent. In fact, it not only contained all of the ingredients for the dish we wanted to cook, but it had almost every single Filipino product that Sunshine could possibly want. (The lady who owns the place, by reason of her large Filipino clientele, stocks almost entirely Filipino products: even imported shampoo and lotion.)

So we stocked up on about $50 worth of ingredients (and Chippy).

In the evening, Sunshine and I cooked my favorite dish from The Philippines, palabok. As you can see below, it is a pasta dish. (Recipe here.) It’s a unique, excellent flavor… very mainstream and pallatable to even the most fussy tongue (in the Philippines it is sold at Jollibee, the Filipino McDonald’s) and it is not very hard to make at all. Just brown some ground pork in a pot, add in chicken broth (the recipe calls for pork broth but good luck finding it) and the other fancier ingredients (bought at the Asian store), then thicken with flour (although I used corn starch). Then serve over rice noodles and add toppings. (The recipe calls for half a dozen different toppings, but you can skip any that you don’t want to include… I stuck with just shrimp, egg, and chives.) We had Uncle Bob and Cousin Bobby over for dinner and served it to them, and they really enjoyed it. (Note to noobs: I had never cooked a pound of rice noodles before. You CAN get that wrong very easily. Follow directions carefully.)

Today, Sunshine and I got up early and drove 45 minutes down to Port Charlotte to attend services with Crossover Christian Fellowship, a non-denominational church composed primarily of the local Filipino community (which it turns out, in Port Charlotte, is a fairly good-sized community). We had gotten the address from the two Filipina ladies we met at the mall yesterday, Joy and Norma. The church service was about 90 minutes long: About 30 minutes of singing followed by an hour-long sermon by Pastor Abner on “What is Man”?

After the church service, there was a party for one of the families’ infant girls. There was all kinds of Filipino food, plus lots of candy. We met a wonderful couple, Tim and Belen, who had brought my favorite Filipino dessert, biko, which is sticky rice with coconut milk and brown sugar.

Lots more Filipino people showed up after the church service was over for the party, including our two acquantainces from yesterday. There were also several American husbands in attendance as well: So Sunshine and I made, oh, the fourth or fifth pinay-kano couple in the place, which was very comforting to see. However, it seems that I was the only American who had ever actually lived in The Philippines… or even visited it.
And of course the birthday girl had a great day, showered with love, sweet things, toys, and play time.

Anyway, as the afternoon wore on, Sunshine made more and more friends. She was as happy as happy can be…

… but then she got home and found her green card had arrived in the mail, and she squealed and giggled and jumped for joy around the house for the rest of the evening.

After sitting around the house all day yesterday “recovering and relaxing”, today we decided to get out of the house.

First, Sunshine and I went to visit Uncle Bob at his friend’s boat in the marina. There was not much going on there, but we had a nice 10-minute visit. After that, we drove down to Port Charlotte and had a wander around the mall. Sunshine and I split a plate of food from the Chinese place at the food court, and then wandered over to Macys where Sunshine found several great bargains in the girls’ department. (I still love that and, I swear, I buy Sunshine the pre-teen stuff that isn’t really necessary because I get such a kick out of paying $5 for a sweater in Macys. I mean, really… how cool is that?)

On the way out of Macys, we ran into 2 Filipna ladies. (They made a comment in Visayan that Sunshine heard, and she immediately turned around and started up a conversation.) It turns out there is a Filipino church in Port Charlotte, and that there are many Filipinos in the area. They invited us to come to their church tomorrow where there would be a birthday party for a baby girl and the chance to meet many other Filipinos. We were obviously thrilled at the prospect.

In the evening, Sunshine and I decided to go out to a bar. We went to the same bar we went to last week, but first off we got there too early (8 p.m., when the bar was mostly empty) and by the time the bar started to fill up 90 minutes later, Sunshine and I decided to call it a night. But we did go over to WalMart, picked up all of the ingredients to make home pizza, and then went home and had a nice evening just eating pizza and relaxing.

Sunshine came out of the bathroom today and into our bedroom in utter agony. I’m a bit of a stoic and, actually, so is Sunshine. But even I could see this was not just female cramps or indigestion. I asked her, “Do you need to go to the hospital?” She answered without hesitation, “Yes.”

I drove Sunshine to the emergency room and her obvious distress put her on the fast track to being seen: But even so, from the time I got her signed in, to the time when her vitals were taken, to the minute or so that we waited for somebody to come fetch us, Sunshine lost consciousness while sitting in her wheelchair. I guess that 10 years of working in the medical industry (if not actually in the hospitals) prepared me better than average as to what was going on and what to expect: Quickly wheeled back to the nearest trauma bay, me describing symptoms and history, half a dozen people hooking up lines and leads, one doctor talking loudly to my unconscious wife. It was still all a bit surreal.

Within a minute, Sunshine was awake and responding. Fluid samples were obtained. Pain medication was administered. She was wheeled off to have an ultrasound, and (as I and the doctor had suspected) the results came back as a ruptured ovarian cyst: probably the most acutely painful thing a woman can ever experience (which was why Sunshine lost consciousness).

Anyway, after a while the pain subsided and Sunshine was able to go home… but not before she asked me to get a visual record of her heroic longanimity (note the tongue: phhhbbbt):

And this will be the first time Mom and Paul are hearing about this: They had left on a weekend vacation this morning shortly before all of this happened. The serious part of Sunshine’s ordeal was over too quickly to call them back as an emergency, and by the time the entire episode was over, Sunshine and I figured that we wouldn’t want to have them spending any more of their vacation worrying about us than necessary. So to all: Sunshine is all better now and will soon be running around the house doing cartwheels as per usual.

Sunshine and I went for a walk in the neighborhood with Puppy Gracie. It is usually such a nice place, but months without any significant rain have made everything green turn to an awful tan color. Mom says I should think that I could be stuck up north, but a pretty snowscape would look better than this. Sunshine stopped to have her photo taken with an orange tree. She reached up to touch an orange and it came off in her hand. Looking scandalized, Sunshine tried to find a place to put the orange back on the tree before somebody saw her stealing oranges. I explained to her that taking an orange was not a problem.

I took Sunshine out to lunch today. We split a giant ham calzone (actually, that is a medium one; the giant “family sized” one is twice the size) at a place called “Mark and Mindy’s” on Route 41. The price was good too: Only $7.50 with the ham topping.

My new camera finally arrived. It totally kicks ass (which is why it was back ordered for 3 weeks). It is a Sony Cybershot DSC-WX9: 16.2 megapixels and 1080i video recording. It has a cool panaromic photo feature (you just hold down the shutter and pan the camera around), HDR processing (takes 3 versions of the same photo in rapid succession at 3 different exposure levels and stitches them together to eliminate shadows/over-exposed areas), a neat “background defocus” tool that gives photos an “SLR” look, and even the ability to take photographs while shooting video simultaneously. Only $150 at Best Buy.

Oh: Geek note. I’ve given up using Google Chrome. First, having 3 browser tabs open would require about 500 megabytes of RAM (and my task manager always showed twice as many instances of Google Chrome being open as there were tabs open). Second, for some reason on my computer, Skype and Google Chrome hated each other and caused an actual BSOD whenever I used both at the same time. Third, all of a sudden Adobe Flash started crashing all the time and I said, “Enough is enough.” I switched back to Firefox.

… when I saw this chart: The top 100 movies of 2011… Blue is available for streaming download; yellow is unavailable.
Compare Netflix’s streaming selection to the next columns (Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu), and you can see what an utter ripoff Netflix streaming is.

p.s. Netflix streaming never had closed captioning either, and closed captioning would be nice for both Paul who has trouble hearing, and Sunshine who has trouble understanding. I checked Amazon and though they are cheaper than Netflix ($79 per year), they don’t have closed captioning, so I’ll pass on them as a replacement for Netflix. Does anybody know if iTunes streaming video has closed captioning? (Will it work on a PC computer? Or only on a Mac?)

The $4 million miniature airport and the computer-driven miniature cars got my interest, but the miniature couple shagging in the field of sunflowers was the point at which you realize that the attention to detail is why this is one of Hamburg’s top tourist attractions.

A good day for kitchen activities: Mom showed Sunshine how to bake her most excellent homemade brownies. After that, I came along and made kani maki sushi for everybody. All day long, Paul had a pot roast in the crock pot that made for an excellent dinner. (I was not sure Sunshine would go for pot roast, but she has declared it to be her most favorite dish ever.)

In the evening, I had Catholic School… Catechism. This evening I learned how to stay awake during boring sermons — a must for any true Catholic. I was serious when I said that the first hour-long presentation I had 2 weeks ago was very interesting. However tonight’s lecture was an hour-and-45-minute exegesis on the role of confession and absolution in Catholicism. It was one of those talks that could have been given in 10 or 15 minutes if certain assumptions about the intelligence of the audience had been made, if certain tangents had not been explored… forced to have been explored by repeated and rather tedious “what if” questions asked by one earnest lady in the back, and if the evening’s lecturer had simply been willing to speak Faster. Than. One. Word. Per. Second.

Sigh. It’s for my Sunshine that I suffer.

To be honest, I’m not sure Sunshine appreciates that I’m becoming a Catholic for her. She really doesn’t do church much. When I ask her to go to church with me, I can tell she really would prefer not to (usually by her, “No! Arggh! Oh alright.” answers to my invitations). But I figure that in the long run, for various reasons that Sunshine cannot see at this point (and I can only barely see myself), having me be a member of the Catholic church will be to our mutual benefit. Besides, I’m sure at some level, Sunshine appreciates the effort.

Mom and Paul (and Puppy Gracie) arrived back from Christmas vacation in New York. I put the silly little chair back in the mail to get my money back and went to WalMart and bought an inflatable mattress to put on the floor of my cramped little bedroom/office, now that Sunshine and I will be sleeping in there, returning the master bedroom to Mom and Paul.

I’m so happy to have Mom and Paul (and Puppy Gracie) back: Sunshine has 2 more people to communicate with. I feel a bit guilty that I did not anticipate the source of Sunshine’s homesickness would primarily be loneliness, and did not make an effort to make some friends here in Florida in the year I spent sitting around waiting for her to arrive. But I honestly had thought of it and realized, “What if the friends I find aren’t really compatible with my wife and I as a couple?” I figured that it would be better for us to seek out a new social circle as a couple, since we aren’t fully ‘traditional’ in our makeup due to our 17-year age difference and culture difference. But still, I bear responsibility for Sunshine’s discomfort, and I am glad that Mom and Paul are now here to help me out in that aspect.

Mom brought Sunshine a bunch of little gifts on her return, which were much appreciated. (Apparently the secret is to wrap the gifts and put a label that says “To Sunshine” on the outside, instead of just letting Sunshine pick out what she wants at the mall… much better effect that way.) Puppy Gracie of course is a gift in herself, being the cutest dog in the world. She walks into the room and Sunshine brightens up.

On Tuesday night, Uncle Bob took Mom, Paul, Sunshine and me to The Moose Club for some excellent (but slow-to-cook) hamburgers, and then off to The Eagles Club (which had no empty seats when we tried earlier at dinnertime) for drinks and dancing. I danced with Sunshine, and she definitely liked that too. I guess I will have to start rekindling my old terpischorean tendencies on a regular basis. (As will my mother, if she and Paul are going to join us on the dance floor: She and Paul got up to dance, and at the culmination of a rather daring boogie-woogie spin under Paul’s guidance, she went kerplunk right on her bottom. She laughed, but not before I had crapped my pants at the thought that she might have hurt herself. But she was fine, thankfully.)

On Wednesday, it was a beautiful day and we all (including Uncle Bob) went to the pool, which was rather full. Due to Aunt Alice spreading the word about Sunshine’s cookie-cooking party, and of course Mom’s constant tales about her daughter-in-law’s visa woes, everybody at the pool already knew of Sunshine and was very happy to finally meet her. On Wednesday evening, Mom took Sunshine into the kitchen and together they cooked chicken Cacciatore. The taste was great, but I’m not a fan of big tomato chunks. But it was great to see Sunshine bonding with Mom and becoming more comfortable here.

I sincerely think that one of the best things I could provide for Sunshine to keep her happy here is a friendly and loving mother-in-law and father-in-law to substitute for the family she left behind in The Philippines. It’s not perfect, but it is an excellent stepping stone. For the moment, living here in the house with my parents (and uncle next door) is actually the best thing for Sunshine’s happiness. Obviously we can’t stay here too long because it is so crowded and Mom and Paul can’t have any guests while we are here… but this household really does put training wheels on Sunshine’s American experience.