Happy Belated CNY!!!

Hello all and Happy Chow Yun Fat! .. Er... Gong Hay Fat Choy... or Xing Nian Kuai Le :p Take your pick ;)

CNY for us was not such a huge affair this year and it seems that every year it's getting less and less festive :( Is it just me? This year I didn't even go to ChinaTown to watch the parades, I just sat at home and chatted with Miss Thien :). Perhaps it was the rain that also took away from the festivities. Or the fact that our skies weren't lit with fireworks that make all those wonderful sounds... As Kenny Sia so tactfully put it, "Peeeewwwww-la-la-la-BOM!!!"

We had a small family gathering, HOTPOT! With waaaaaaaay too much food! Wow! As you can see we had two pots going. The soup base was a simple chicken broth but one of the tastiest I've had in awile! Our choices consisted of: Beef, pork, chicken, fish, fish ball, octopus ball, tofu, tofu stuffed with mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, button mushrooms, some other mushroom :p, artificial crab, shrimp, spinach, sprouts, kale, and... some other stuff :p forgot what it's called. Our dinner lasted for the better portion of 2 hours possibly longer... It's a little bit of a blur as I got so stuffed from the food. Really got stuffed that night, I'm pretty sure I was done after the 1 hour mark... but it was so good I couldn't stop! By the end of it, we hadn't even finished EVERYTHING... there was waaaay too much, easily enough for 15 people :D

Ah well, with dinner done I headed downstairs to chat w/ Jacq again. The rest of the family wound down by watching some TV (Can't remember what was playing... some Jacky Chan movie). Oh, for those of you who are dorks like me and use the ZSNES emulator... have you ever wondered what zsKnight looks like? You're in luck :D he's married to my cousin :p and there he is on the couch! :D I've temporarily mosiac'd his face pending his approval ;)

During the wind-down period we also wound up playing with a Gov't issued spared-no-expense polaroid camera (Sis works for the Gov't) and for the life of us couldn't figure out how to get the flash going (?) WTH. It doesn't look too complicated, right? Ya... no. Looks can be decieving. This this is waaaay too technologically advanced for us... meh. We ended up taking a bunch of photos w/o the flash... most of them ended up looking a little disturbing.. Almost like spirits in the photos. The backgrounds were so dark and the only things you could see were our blurry faces :p. (I'll post a pic soon)

Well, we finally got to the DDR portion of the night and spent a good hour playing! Great fun! as long as you weren't sitting downstairs while we were playing :P You see, here in Canada, (when not made of snow) our houses are made of cardboard... as a result, anything that happens upstairs is amplified and sounds like a herd of elephants trampling overhead. No pictures or footage of DDR, sorry folks. Damn.. have to still post the other footage :(

Time to call it a night! Take care and may you all have a happy and prosperous New Year! Bow wow!