Happy Chinese New Year, gong xi fa cai (which, by the way, is pronounced “gong shee fa tsai”), welcome to the year of the bovine creature (in the plural, it’s called cattle, but there doesn’t seem to be a word for it in the singular – “cow” doesn’t apply, since it applies only to the females of the species).
A little recap of the last week or so. Saturday and Sunday last week were busy. There was lots of cleaning and tidying, then on Sunday Zen had a full day of softball (7:30 AM to 4:45 PM) followed by 30 minutes of swimming lesson. Monday night we went out for Mom’s 70th birthday. Naoko and I met early on in Holland Village, bought a present for mum, then went for a beer to kill time until mum ‘n’ dad showed up with Zen. We had found a nice place in to take her on the rooftop of the main building. The atmosphere was awesome – rooftop, breezy, lots of plants, so it hit two of mom’s prerequisites – the food was quite nice, and the service was even quite nice. We got home and ate local birthday cake, which was very sweet, but yummy.
Rooftop party!
Cake! (No room to put 70 candles, though, unfortunately)
Zen had his Chinese New Year celebration on Friday morning; he normally has his school in the afternoon session, so there was an opportunity to walk Zen to school, which was great. Zen wore a blue Chinese-style costume that was very cute, some of the people we passed on the way in gave him great big smiles. Zen sang Chinese songs and had a very nice time.
On Saturday we slept in, then took care of errands, and in the evening had poolside drinks, then watched Woody Allen’s “Radio Days.” Everybody besides me fell asleep watching it, but most of us agreed that it was a pretty funny film. I found it less interesting than I had in my memory, with long passages that seems strung together, like when Mia Farrow is singing a long number. What did that have to do with radio or Woody Allen’s childhood? The acting was like the actors had performed it a million times on Broadway and they were going through the motions to put the film together, so the heart was not really there, but it’s a small complaint – the film was funny and warm. After that, I kept on watching “The Song Remains The Same.” I can’t believe that this world ever had a young Robert Plant and Jimmy Page who would put out a new album every year. What would it have been like to have gone down the store to buy Led Zeppelin II on the day it was released? I can hardly imagine. I was five months and two days old when Led Zeppelin II was released on October 22nd, 1969. Jimmy Page was 25. Robert Plant had just turned 20.
On Sunday we woke up early-ish. After breakfast we went to the local park and threw around the frisbee and played badminton, also played catch. Walked past Zen’s school and saw an interesting sign, with an iroic statement.
Went home, had a nice lunch, and wrote up my review for “The Song Remains The Same.” It was a nice, quiet afternoon, played guitar, went for a swim had a great dinner of Naoko’s scrumptious baked pork and baked vegetables.