Pizza, Karaoke, and Bicycling in the Rain

Today was another day of data entry and filling out of reports at the office.  Also, I put another one of my skills to use: creating flyers in Publisher.  I’d never created a bilingual flyer before today.  It was to advertise the fact that on Thursdays, we offer $20 walk-in legal consultations regarding immigration law.  Rodolfo and Dalay, the regular employees in the Cuban-Haitian office, proofread my Spanish, and we all worked together to come up with a succinct way to express all of the meaning in the phrase “Walk-In Thursdays.”  We finally settled on “Jueves Libres (no es necesario cita).”

It’s been cloudy most of the week, and today, it finally rained.  It was raining when it was time to go home, so I asked for and received a car ride home, leaving my bike under the outside stairs at the office.  Later, while Marion, the boys, and two of their friends were making plans to go out, I realized that we needed that bike, because we were all planning to bike around town.  Marion drove me to the office, and I bicycled back home, through the rain.

Our original plan had been to bike over and join the crowd of people-watchers at the big celebrity party tonight, but since it was raining, we decided to bike a shorter distance to a local pizza parlor, have dinner, and see if the weather cleared up and if we felt like going out there.  What none of us knew until we got there was that Friday nights were karaoke nights at this particular pizza parlor.  We all got into it, and we all had a lot of fun.  I added three new songs to my list of Songs I’ve Performed As Karaoke: “Overkill” by Men At Work, “Where The Streets Have No Name” by U2, and “Soak Up The Sun” by Sheryl Crow.  I sang all of those by myself, but I also sang “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey again, with three of the boys.

We went back to the house, hung out for a while, and then four out of our original group of six decided to make one last attempt to get to the party, as the rain had temporarily stopped.  This time, we made it.  We only stayed and watched limos arrive for about twenty minutes, though, because it started to rain again.  It stopped after five minutes, but by then, we were on our way home.  That was a fun night.