cars, curtains & clairvoyants

Arnaud, Arvind and I organized the upstairs office today and made storage areas on both sides of the sloped ceiling by sewing and hanging curtains. I also made a big batch of chick pea curry to take to Anna and Roger, who had a baby boy on Wednesday night.

We visited a couple of cars today – a Honda Accord, Toyota Starlet and Subaru Legacy, but each one had something wrong with it…200K more kilometers than stated, no acceleration, body rust, etc. I’m not in a rush, so I’m not going to settle – I won’t be able to get anything great in my price range, but I can be a little choosy. We did find some excellent real-fruit ice cream along the way, though.

Arvind was asked to speak at a Spiritualist Church of New Zealand service this evening, and he invited us along for ‘a real Kiwi experience.’ I thought it would be a good chance to pick back up the mini-tradition Sabrina and I started in the Cook Islands of going to a new religious service each Sunday, so I went along without any convincing. Arnaud needed a lot more, but ended up coming too. After a crazy trip down to town in Arvind’s convertible, blasting Indian music and singing and dancing along the way again, we got to the church. Half the people there looked pretty New Age-y, the other half looked just like the older generation at my childhood church. The service was an experience – instead of a sermon, a clairvoyant went through and spoke to about 1/5 of the congregation about what he saw going on. I sort of felt like I was missing out on Kool-Aid or something – everything he said to each person could have applied to anyone anytime (“You’re making a decision this week” or “Something’s on your mind, right?”) yet everyone he spoke responded with surprise at the clarity with which he saw their individual situation. Ok, everyone except poor Arnaud, who got singled out for a ‘reading’ even though he’d been hunching his 6’4” frame over in his seat so he didn’t get called on. Something else I found interesting: instead of saying ‘please stand’ for hymns, they said ‘Let’s be upstanding’ – took me a while to figure it out, I was thinking of being upstanding as involving more than getting out of my chair.

Just to cap the night off on a completely bizarre note, when we stopped at the video store after church I recommended 40-year-old-virgin. What I didn’t realize then – but certainly realized about 50 f-bombs and 5-6 very uncomfortable scenes later – was that we accidentally got the unrated version. I felt responsible, but Arvind and Arnaud both ended up loving the movie, not only finding it hilarious but also picking out a not-all-that-far-out-there message from it.