#aniceplacetolive

[hueoi]

We're extremely honored to have received this award @fvchamber 🙏🙏 Congrats to all of the Finest Leaders and Business Industry Winners! Let's all help to make sure the City of Fountain Valley continues its tradition of being "A Nice Place to Live, Work and Play" 🙌 #FinestLeaders #FountainValley #ANicePlaceToLive #HueOi #PhoHueOi #FVChamber (at Hue Oi Vietnamese Cuisine) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbx5dl6Po5D/?utm_medium=tumblr

[thekfile]

a nice place to live, part 2

I'm not sure how long the phone had been ringing, but I had a sinking feeling that this was not the first call. I answered, holding the phone a foot away from my ear. Maldita floja! My gauge had gotten better since I moved back home. Mom was working as a noon duty that summer watching over asshole third graders who made fun of her broken English. Kids had crowded around a chainlink fence and as my mom walked over, she saw her negrito chow chow sniffing around some snot-nosed kids throwing rocks at him. She played dumb and asked where Milo was. Maybe he went to work. I yawned, too tired to realize the snarkiness of my comment. Pendeja! He is by MY school. Ven aggaralo antes que lo maten! Nobody is going to kill your dog, I said. She must have heard about half of that before she hung up. I entertained the idea of letting that mutt roam free for a few more hours, but given my circumstances and given who was calling the shots, I decided against it. El que paga, manda. On Wednesday mornings, Milo followed my mom closely while she dragged the trashcans to the curb. He sneaked out right before the black gate locked shut and waited, camouflaged easily by his coat so long as he sat patiently, like a good boy. Once her car screeched away, he would run down the driveway and follow mom towards the direction of the school. After that I wouldn’t see him until he came home around eleven or elven-thirty, just before she got home. I followed him down the gravel road behind siamese pastel-colored houses from the early eighties. I peeked into backyards and saw formerly green lawns now brown with cracked patches of earth and yellow crabgrass islands. It was easy to tell which houses had kids. Sometimes they didn't have any – those houses had the nicest yards.

[thekfile]

a nice place to live, part 1

It was so hot that summer. I was stomping barefoot around the dirty green carpet, opening every stiff window and turning on every dusty fan I could find. It was humid too – that wretched kind of humid that makes you feel like you’ve pissed your chonies. I took a cold shower, surrounded my room with multiple fans and sat in the dark watching Gilligan’s Island in my underwear. I played solitaire with actual cards because I love the clack sound a card makes when you’re putting it down. I had taken time off to recuperate and “find myself” but by the fourth month I was in a routine and both my mom and I began to get irritable about the situation for obvious yet different reasons.

Around the time Threes Company started, the air cooled and entangled between the fans, forcing me to dress. I closed some windows, turned off most of the fans and quietly fixed a drink in the kitchen under dim lighting. I would see shapes out of the corner of my eyes and the screaming faces stretched within the grain of the wooden cabinets. If I was still up around the time The Jeffersons came on, I would hear a woman laughing far off into the distance.

By the time Laverne and Shirley came on, I would gather the large floral printed pillows from the sofa and surround the tower, muffling the sound of what we then called logging onto the world wide web until I felt drowsy. It must have been two thirty or three when I began to slowly drift asleep and Andy Griffith’s voice lulled me in and out of dreams. By five-twenty I would awake to the tail end of an infomercial and slightly before Denise Austen’s morning workout. Sometimes I was able to sleep another stint and wake before eleven, just in time for I Love Lucy.

[aj-online-dot-co-dot-uk]

In honour of Back To The Future Day, here's some much loved souvenirs from our trip to the Secret Cinema Hill Valley 1955 Town Fair last year!! An awesome day of live action cinema! #backtothefuture #bttf #martymcfly #aniceplacetolive

[californyear]

#tbt to the 1950s and Secret Cinema #hillvalley #aniceplacetolive 👗