Happy Chinese New Year to all!

The festivities this year are markedly more festive than they have been for previous years, for myself, anyway. I remember I was stuck in OCS this time last year.

The Catholic priests had the forbearance to postpone Ash Wednesday, and it's Ash Friday now. It makes sense, considering that it's more like Mardi Gras the way we're consuming food now. If we're not careful all that training will go to waste.

And of course, with the extended family over for once, we earned the rights to host as we had sufficient mass to attract other families to gravitate around us. We didn't have to travel vast tracts of empty road to be at the mercy of the hospitality of other people for once. So I guess, it's a more "real" celebration in that sense, considering most of the time it's pretty much "us" over here.

I'm trying to stay awake for the England-Holland game too. It was pretty insane trying to queue to get into the 7-11 at Sixth Avenue today because there was a line of people which took 1 hr 17 mins from end to counter. I guess there were enough sufficiently bored people wishing to usher in the luck of the new year.