This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

This is a story about yams, leaving home, and Pacific Rim. (Ok there's not a lot of pacific rim)

It's my last week in New Zealand, and I finally packed the majority of my possessions in the small hours of Sunday morning before my dad arranged to come pick them up around half past eleven. I had the whole week beforehand to get packed, but procrastination is my strong suit.

By the time he showed up, I still had balls of yarn and CDs and craft supplies and half a box of knicknacks scattered around, but my clothes and books and piles of paper were good to go so I got the bulk of things cleared out. I've been shuttling the last couple of boxes myself from my flat to my parents' place, and I'll get the last of them out today. We had brunch at an American-style breakfast bar on Sunday, and we invited two old friend-families over for dinner that night.

I have no clue if there's a single tidy word in English for "a family whose kids are around the same age so you all invited each other over for barbecues and potluck-type things while they were growing up", but I suspect it's steadily losing its need of use so maybe that's for the best. James (I don't know what his current online pseudonym is so sorry if you're reading this bro, I'm stealin' yo name) and I have been friends right through school, and his mum is unanimously in charge of desserts at these gatherings. I've never in sixteen years eaten a cake of hers that let me down, and she's basically like a second mother to me.

Seeing the extended friend-families after so long was a bit weird (the eldest of us kids are all working, the youngest are just about through high school, two are out of town at universities, and the parents have changed jobs a couple of times), but good fun. The conversation tends immature and oft-punctuated by someone screeching with laughter for most of the evening. James' mum is sitting with us while we're taking turns defacing a discarded magazine advert for Teen Beach Movie, when she tells the soon-laughing table:

"Oh Manu, James told me you took yams into a movie theatre."

Context.

James and I agreed to grab dinner and go and see Pacific Rim week or two ago. The intense negotiations over what were acceptable pizza toppings when shouting some dinner brought up James' lack of fondness for root vegetables.

But parsnips, I protested. Sweet potato! Yams!

"Yams," I insisted, with a little more enthusiasm than was probably appropriate. James didn't understand what the fuss was about, instead offering to ask one of the waitstaff if they did pizza with yams on it. I offered for him to shut up, but probably only dug my hole deeper when we swung by the supermarket afterward to grab movie fare. In my defence, the yams were on special at the supermarket, which would've been closed by the time the movie finished. I only had a coat with decent-sized pockets, so while James toted in bulk bin lollies and a drink, I had a bag of yams.

I still cannot believe he told his mother. "Just shut up and eat your yams, Manu," James says to me when I complained that the premise+trailer for some upcoming movie was terrible. "Enjoy your yams," he laughs when we both head off home after a very spectacular and explodey hour or two.

I do. I did enjoy those yams. I roasted them to perfection, although I had a panicked trip back to the flat yesterday afternoon when I forgot I put the last of them in the oven, and left the fucking oven on when I left the flat. So many stupid thoughts running through my head, like "Would I have to go to court if I burnt down the flat? Do unattended ovens even cause fires? Would my flatmate's clinically senile cat figure out how to escape a burning building? How long was I out roughly? Would my unclaimed bond cover smoke damage? Would I ever hear the fucking end of it from James if I burnt my flat down cooking yams?"

I found out the answer to precisely zero of those questions, as the yams had done me the courtesy of becoming a charred package of tinfoil rather than the catalyst to a ruined week. I'd had a long day with a lot of running about, and unattended cooking had clearly been a poor decision. I'm still not packed and I've booked out my last three evenings before I depart to various social engagements, but on the bright side:

-My former minimum-wage fulltime job paid me out a thousand dollars worth of unpaid leave
-I can probably call on my university professor for a reference if I apply for a science-related job in Japan
-I leave for Japan this week! Excitement
-I didn't burn the flat down, so I can probably get my bond back which is extra money for my new camera
-yams are still delicious