I had two important calls yesterday.

For some reason Tracfone doesn’t allow calls to or from Nigeria so my Dad had to bring the entire family to his office to talk with me on Skype. I haven’t heard my mom’s voice in a long, long while and I was happy to catch up with the rest of the family. Christmas preparations are going on full-blast and as my ‘evil’ brothers listed the things they were going to be enjoying, my mouth watered.

My mom is the best cook I know. There’d be fried and jollof rice, pounded yam or starch (one of our Delta staples) and certainly lots and lots of meat and cold malt drinks. Arggggh… I can’t wait until next year.

I’ve become something of a family celebrity — apparently, one of my Dad’s friends saw my interview with Deolu Akinyemi and sent it to him. The whole family’s read it several times :oops:.

If I were home what would I be doing now? It’s 12:00am here, that is 6:00am in Nigeria. I’d be in the kitchen chopping green beans (I am I used to be the fastest cutter). My Dad would probably be looking for something ‘manly’ to pull us away from the kitchen — pulling up the little grass beginning to sprout around the fence for example.

My cousins were as hilarious as ever. My younger brother wants me to send him games. ‘Chief’ (that’s what we call my elder brother) wants a copy of the Kamasutra (I pretended not to understand what he was talking about). I’d ordered a copy of The Da Vinci Code for my parents sometime in November — they still haven’t gotten it. Bukky in her own way didn’t ask for anything. I have to remember to get her something when I return next year. I think I’ll talk to the family next week again.

The second call was to Miss Green Eye. I checked my server logs for the past few days and I’ve been getting strange hits from Google and Yahoo. About 85% of the search terms that ended up on my blog were ‘Vera Ezimora’ and ‘Vera Ezimora pictures.’ What the… is the relationship between Azuka Okuleye and Vera Ezimora? Some poor lovesick dudes seem to be looking for a picture.

I gave her a call, and honestly, I expected to hear one of those Ajegunle voices. I don’t talk much, and only few people like Lee have seen and heard me in one of my extremely rare talkative moods.

I would have started off with something like, ‘this doesn’t sound like someone whose hobby is washing dishes’ but I guess everything flew out of my head. I mumbled a few words, and God bless her, I’d told her before that I don’t talk much.

She has a nice voice, and before you ask, I’m not in the habit of recording voices and playing them over and over again. That makes the first blogger I’ve talked to.

I’m off to bed. Merry Christmas everyone!