If you read the December 2009 issue of the OPRAH Magazine, you’ll notice this Sondra Roberts Satin Flower Holiday Bag was featured in there. If you know me, you’ll know I love unusual handbags… what I wouldn’t do to get my hands on this one 
. Do you like it? What kind of bags do you like?
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You’d think that on weekends, I would be spared the annoying sound of my alarm clock. Well, I was… because I forgot to set it last night and I almost overslept this morning and woke up with a start.
Steev had to be at the driving school by 8:45am (yes, again!) but luckily I didn’t have to drive him to last week’s location. Raine had a movie date at the mall with her girl friends from school at 11:00am. Since everyone was going to be out, I thought Skye and I could hang out at the mall for lunch after seeing Raine off.
And of course, we just had to pick the last shopping weekend before Chinese New Year, to be at the mall. Well, I may be all done with my CNY shopping but apparently the rest of the world isn’t.
The basement parking was full within an hour of the mall opening and there must’ve been 100 other cars circling around like vultures trying to snag a spot. Admittedly I’m not a very good vulture so after half an hour, I decided it was time to call it quits, drop Raine off, pay a dollar’s parking for not parking and leave with my tail between my legs.
Skye and I then went to pick up some fast food before picking Steev up for lunch. He doesn’t quite relish eating at the dirty canteen near the driving school so he was going to have lunch at home and then have me drive him back out to finish the afternoon session of his driving course 
.
Now I’m home with a splitting headache from the mercilessly hot sun and trying to get a bit of work done on my computer before my cell phone starts ringing again for my taxi service. In an hour, I’ll be rushing out of here to pick up both Raine and Steev, and then go play vulture – again – at the grocery store.
Don’t you just envy my colorful Sunday? Please say you do.
As you know, my days are long and hectic. Come night time, I’m sometimes just too tired to do any real work on my computer and end up surfing around for entertainment instead, and I found this funny vacation rental commercial.
Well, with a name like Unitard, how can this guy not be funny as he goes around saving families from getting into bad vacation rental deals that ruins the entire holiday for the whole family?
Why, he says, when they can go over to Vacation Rental.org and pick out the best vacation lodging ever. Go watch the video at http://www.vacationrental.org/info/blogs/funny-vacation-rental-commercial—unitard.html. Enjoy!
Okay, so Chinese New Year is just around the corner and it coincides with Valentine’s Day this year. This time every year, we’d be trying to catch every lion dance performance in town. But not this year! Seems my teens have finally outgrown the obsessive lion chasing though we’ll still be picking a few spectacular ones to watch.
As usual, we won’t be traveling out of town like most folks. We prefer to avoid the rush and just visit some friends and relatives here in town. Now if we were going on vacation in Orlando, that would be a different story.
I’ll be cooking a simple reunion dinner at home on New Year’s Eve. Customarily daughters having been married out of the family are not welcome to have the reunion dinner with their side of the family because it’s believed that it’ll impoverish the family. Hahaha, I call it poppycock and fiddlesticks!!
They could, of course, ignore the superstition but my Dad celebrates it with his ‘new’ family and I’m technically an ‘orphan’ who never gets invited so… That leaves Hip2bDad’s side of the family where we’re customarily supposed to be having the reunion dinner with. But since his Dad also celebrates with his ‘new’ family, us ‘orphans’ decided to heck with all this nonsense and just have our own reunion 
.
On the first day of Chinese New Year, we observe a vegetarian diet. On the second day, I’ll be cooking the first meal of the year. As usual, we’ll be avoiding Chinese restaurants like the plague for the 14 days of CNY, away from the crowd and having to pay through our noses.
And that’s about it. Got a whole stash of festive cookies, mandarin oranges, drinks and flowers for the altar. Not much left to do except finalize my two menus. We don’t traditionally decorate the house with festive symbols, plants or lanterns. The kids have some new clothes which we bought over the Christmas holidays. Hip2bDad and I don’t bother with new clothes. No trips to the salon for any of us either, yay!
And we’re set for a whole week off school, that’s all we care about 
. Call us boring, call us weird but we’ve always done our own thang much to the horror of our extended families. We’re not your typical family. So the way we celebrate Chinese New Year shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone 
!!
If you’ve been following my tweets on Twitter, you might just have caught on to what happens in my house every weekend. Yes, my three teens would set up their laptops in a row and play their computer games.
It does get quite noisy as they cheer, jeer and laugh at each other. I jokingly threatened to send them for rapid detox for opiates, more like rehab for computer addicts, if they make too much noise.
My smart alecks argue that this is their family time . They’re too stressed out by the extended school hours this year, they say. They don’t get to spend much time together and this is how they destress and stay sane.
I’ve just finished my second breakfast – a stack of 20 crackers with kaya (coconut jam), a cup of mango yogurt and a bowl of herbal soup. Quite frankly, those 20 crackers, they do nothing for me. That’s why I have to supplement them with yogurt and soup, and even then *sigh*…
I have two breakfasts every morning. My first is at 6:30am with my 3 teens before they leave for school. Usually it’s two slices of wholemeal toast and a cup of coffee. I hate to say this but bread does nothing for me either. I eat it and minutes later, poof, it’s gone!
I’m a pig not because I love food, but because I have a metabolism rate that turns its nose up as skimpy, frivolous food like bread, cookies, cakes, chips and salads. Last year, I went on a one-month vegetarian diet and almost starved myself to death .
My tummy needs substance, that’s all. It needs something to hold on to, something to waltz around with. Believe it or not, I don’t eat a lot and I’m not greedy. Heck, I’m not even that crazy about food. I mean, have you ever met a Chinese who is not a food-crazed lunatic (no offense)?
Well, howdy doody, nice to meet ya, I’m 4th generation and maybe somewhere along the line, my genes got wrapped around the wrong beanpole 
. Goodness knows I’ve passed this defective interesting gene to Skye, my 14 year old, who is perpetually hungry like me.
And lest you think we look like brick houses from this constant eating, we’re both rather slim. Not skinny but slim. Even the best weight loss supplement would be lost on us. That said, I’m hungry again and lunch time is still an hour away.
We received our first wedding invitation of the year. The second daughter of Hip2bDad’s cousin is getting married at the end of this month and we’re all invited. Contrast this to my cousin’s wedding last December when we were told out loud that our 3 teens were not invited. I’m almost ashamed it was my side of the family that did something like that 
.
We will be attending all 3 events, i.e. the catered dinner at the bride’s home on the night before the wedding, the church wedding and lunch reception (? we’ll decide at the last minute), and the dinner reception at the Sheraton.
I’m not sure if the couple will be leaving on one of those destination weddings immediately afterwards. I hear the Riviera Maya is very beautiful and just perfect for honeymoons. We’ll be visiting the bride’s family during Chinese New Year so I’m sure we’ll find out more about the wedding then .
Okay, so I’ve finally signed Steev up for driving school. He’s 18+ and definitely old enough to drive and it would neat to have a backup driver to chauffeur my girls around .
Yesterday he went to take his written test after attending a full day of driving theory the previous Sunday. The driving school has a van service to ferry them to the test center. We didn’t know which test center he’d been assigned to but apparently it’s somewhere out in the boonies.
Me being the worrywart decided to go check the place out myself so I could pick Steev up if he finished early. If he would’ve taken the van, he would’ve had to wait for everyone to finish their tests which might’ve taken the whole day.
We had to be at the pickup point at 9:30am. We were already running late but I had to stop by the gas station. Steev jumped out, stuck my credit card into the gas pump and it threw back an error, yikes! I backed up to the gas pump behind and Steev started over, and again it spat out my credit card. OMG, we wer e going to be late. So I said forget the gas, let’s go.
We got to the pickup point just in the nick of time and that’s when they told us the van would only be leaving at 10am. Dangit! All that rush for nothing. So I left Steev there to wait and we went hunting for the nearest gas station.
Back at the pickup point, the van driver agreed that I could follow him to the test center. So Steev rode with me and I had Raine along as well to note the directions to the place so I could find my way back there later.
As I expected, following the van would not be easy. I was pretty sure the guy would speed all the way there since it was a Sunday, no traffic jams. And I was right. He flew down the highway with me chugging along at my usual turtle speed .
And there was Steev in the back seat going, Mom, maybe you should step on it a little, we’re going to lose him. And so started my high speed chase like one of those ‘follow that car’ scenes we’ve seen all too often in movies.
Much as I’d like to say I drove like Paul Walker in Fast and Furious, I was doing way below speed limit. Hey, I’m not in the habit of speeding with kids in my car, okay? So I was left wa-aay behind! The van driver didn’t care, he just raced on and me, chug-a-chug-chug, hahaha! To cut a long story short, we made it there in one piece, Steev passed the test and this tailing a van to the boonies is not something I’d care to repeat .
