恭喜発財！

State of mind: sleepy
Current soundtrack: The ceiling fan

To all the wonderful people on my miniscule leadership: Happy Chinese New Year!



As most of y'all know - it's the year of the pig! I'm a bit confused as to WHAT pig it is, though - I seem to recall 2007 being the year of the Fire Pig (charsiew jokes abound) but CCTV and some friends insist it is the year of the METAL Pig. @_@ In any case, I'm finally off on break, the new clothes have been bought (including the obligatory red garments for the first day) and the food! O, the food!


Only one of my favourite sweets in the world - nien ko, or nien gao. However you spell it, it's a confection of molasses rolled in grated coconut. The idea is that you give it to the stovegod (and I am the only one amused by the fact that in Japanese it is the Koujin [荒神]*) and when he goes up to report to Big Boss Jade Emperor in Heaven, he'll have his lips stuck together or only be able to say sweet things.

It's also very good fried. Mmmmmmm.


This is what dinner looks like at my gran's on the first day of CNY...after everyone's done with it :D There's about enough for 11-12 people.


Tau yu prawns! These tiger prawns cooked in soya sauce aren't exactly the famous hee hee har har** dish, but what the hey, they do. And are super tasty. Thanks, grandma.


Joo hoo char is a mix of cuttlefish, turnips and shiitake mushrooms, all fried nicely together and eaten with rice or in little packages of lettuce (sang choy sounds like 'live and prosper' - please no Spock jokes). It's my favourite dish in the entire universe (mostly because of them thar turnips) but it's highly labour-intensive and my grandmother's getting a bit too old to prepare it this year...so my uncle made it. It tasted very strongly of fat, for some reason. This is one of those dishes I want to learn how to make before chow-ing off somewhere overseas.


And what's CNY dinner without a nice sweet mandarin orange afterwards, hm? P:

As for how it's going with work - well, things could have been worse, and could have been better. :/ Multimedia Production project threw up on me--but that was my fault. WHY it's my fault, I'm still trying to figure out. Next time read the gorram brief, genius Motion Graphics went all right, given the circumstances. We got the Hue Visualab team to come and critique our work presentations, but I didn't get much of anything beyond technical tips. This usually means in my book it was really bad, or so very mediocre nothing could be said. I AM, however, quite pleased with the fact I did manage to put together a whole new one for submission. It even rendered...fairly...smoothly. Consumer Behaviour went very well, what with our group's 'dramatic' presentation. JL, Cons, James, Yen, go you! :D

Suffice it to say that I'm slowly coming back to life and I owe my friend Lynn about two pots of tea. We met up earlier today--but more on that, and other teeny issues later! Sleep is a rare commodity in design!

*Convoluted Ninja Manual joke. Might be better to just pretend you get this one. ;)
** Hee hee har har is a prawn (har) dish which, for obvious reasons, is supposed to bring you happiness.