Tag: newyear

2021: more chances for a happy new year

Hey, 2021, things haven’t got better since January 1. Enough has been written, posted, etc. about the details that we don’t need to go in to them here.

Dear year of 2021, you have more chances for a good start.

For many of us in the USA, January 20 is one of those chances. Joe Biden is due to be inaugurated as President. I hope that the incumbent racist rabble-rouser will be out of the White House before then.

For those with Asian affiliations, February 12 will be another chance for a happy new year. The new year will start as the Rat (yes, really) gives way to the Ox. I hope that the new year will reward those who have the virtues of the Ox.

Oxen are honest and earnest. They are low key and never look for praise or to be the center of attention.

Talking of the Ox reminds me that I should play my bass more in 2021. Because, you know, The Ox was one of the nicknames for John Entwistle of The Who.

I wish you a great 2021, and welcome your thoughts on the new year, whenever if starts for you.

Haiku for January 2005

Colors! New year’s dawn?
No, return of last pizza
From 2014.

The haiku describes the my first waking minutes of 2015. No, I didn’t celebrate the new year wildly I didn’t even stay up to see in 2015.

I’m pretty sure that I had a viral infection. It probably wasn’t flu: I had a flu shot a month or two ago. It probably wasn’t the pizza that made me sick: none of my partners in pizza were sick that night. However, some have been ill subsequently, in a manner compatible with the virus hypothesis.

I just ate cheese for the first time this year, having avoided it since the incident described in the haiku. Some time later this month. I’ll be ready to eat pizza again, and then to make my first batch of pizza of the year.

February will see at least one haiku from me. It will also see another new year: the year of the goat, or sheep, will start on February 19.

I hope that the new year is a happy and healthy one for you.

New Year Continues

bandes_chinatown494The Chinese/lunar new year, that is. It’s a 15-day festival that finishes on Mon Feb 9, so we’re about halfway through it. There were festivities in Boston’s Chinatown today. We didn’t go, but our way back from the Childrens Museum took us near, so we caught a little from the car.

Charles Bandes was among those who went and took photos. His blog post does a great job of establishing the Chinatown context with photos such as this one (thanks to Charles for permission to post this copyrighted image). The post also reminds me of some of the reasons we decided not to take the kids to Chinatown today: “I had forgotten just how loud and smoky the fireworks are – got a little too close to some and got sprayed with bits of paper.”

I found Charles via Universal Adam, who also linked today to an interesting account of eating a pig’s head.

In the Year of the Ox

So here we are in the Year of the Ox. Here in Boston, we are 20some minutes into that year (assuming it started at midnight). We followed the new year’s eve traditions, getting the house cleaner than it’s been in a long time, eating noodles, fish, and other traditional new year things.

On Saturday, we went to Kam Man in Quincy to stock up, as did rather a lot of other people. I was surprised to find that one can buy Kung Fu noodles there. We’ve been enticing our kids to eat noodles by relating them to Kung Fu Panda (a movie that the whole family likes). We didn’t try the KFN, though, since we haven’t resorted to instant noodles yet.