Monday is Chinese New Year. It will turn the Year of the OX. So please try not to keep writing Year of the Rat on all your checks.
It’s Sunday here, and the day before Chinese New Year is typically spent scrubbing clean the house. Ironically, we’ve suspended our usual Sunday cleaning, because the wife being ethnic Chinese, we’re having to go do family stuff. Feasted at her brother’s house already. Back home for a rest, then off to her uncle’s this evening.
The big Chinese-Thai temple down below our balcony is pretty busy today but should be more so tomorrow.
Lots of firecrackers going off everywhere. The pigeons around our building must be freaking out.
We just polished aff about 20 dishes and t e mahjong has started. fireworks are sporadically going off. we’ve got a giant box of weapons grade firecracker strings, rockets, etc. it’s hard to describe just how much fireworks will go off at midnight tonight and the cummulative total that will be blown up over the next 2 weeks.
It is generally considered not a lucky year if it’s your year. i’m an ox as well. Obama should at a minimum wear red underwear for the next 12 ,onths. there are other specific mojo’s Obama can use as well when prescribed by a geomancer.
I’ll be updating the pigeon thread shortly, but yes, it does seem to be winding down, with Big Pidgee the sole occupant of the balcony now.
Monday here, the actual Chinese New Year Day. So Happy New Year again! We had a grand time at the wife’s uncle’s house last night. I actually started this thread about him a year and a half ago. I often take some sort of bottle of premium liquor to his house, but the wife said hey, he’s 80 now, so maybe we shouldn’t. So we picked up some quarts of Swensen’s ice cream to contribute to the feast instead. But the uncle broke out a bottle of Martell cognac that was half full; he’d drunk the first half himself earlier in the day. He’s an uncle by marriage, married to my father-in-law’s sister, so I don’t know his family, but he has a half sister – they share the same father, a randy old rake back in his day, I gather – whom I’ve never met but who is 101 years old and reportedly in the prime of health, at least for a 101-year-old. So I hope to be drinking with him for some time to come.
Even though he actually won’t be 82 until later this year, on Chinese New Year Day all Chinese bump up a year, so he is (sort of) considered 82 now and his half-sister 102. (And then, the Chinese seem to count their age from conception, or at least some of them, so I never know if the age I’m hearing is another year off or not. He’s pure Chinese, a resident alien with a Taiwanese passport but raised in mainland China west of Shanghai.)
