Chinese New Year Dinner and Pictures

First, the best: Piety Flats, my favorite!! Mercantile Red!

Look at it while you can, it is an endangered species in this house.

Dinner: We made stir fry and....drum roll please...Egg Rolls!!!!!! Home made! Now, our last attempt was not particularly wonderful, but this time there was perhaps an Egg Roll Fairy sitting on my shoulder while I cut the veggies. They were divine. I always forget to take pictures of the work up to dinner, but at least I remember to get pictures of the final product.

Little Miss will at least be able to enjoy an occasional Chinese-esque dinner.

Those are dips in between the food. One is Soy Sauce, Cilantro, garlic powder, cayenne, rice vinegar and lemon juice. the other is soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, dried hot mustard, and some cayenne pepper. Cora liked the former, I preferred the latter.

So, this is the Year of the Ox that we are boldly stepping into. I hope it brings us a daughter or son.

Cora has already mentioned not cleaning on the Chinese New Year. Apparently it is said to clean the good luck away...it was not until I began dinner that she decided to tell me that using sharp knives on CNY is bad luck and I thought, shoot, that's just a dumb superstition, what kind of bad luck could it be? I continued chopping happily. A few minutes later, I tried to take a piece of vegetable off my knife and promptly sliced myself. Ahh, THAT kind of bad luck. And, can you believe? Cora laughed at me! While she was putting the bandaid on my wound she was laughing at me!

At least it was a delicious dinner. Happy Chinese New Year! Gung Hay Fat Choy!!!

I had second graders today. They were considerably more annoying than last time. We spent some time discussing the best way to walk in line. We spent some time practicing quiet. We spent lots of time with our heads down. Still, it wasn't a horrible day, and I am really much nicer than some.

I walked into a class to say hi to my neighbor and she had my blog up showing someone else...(I had no idea I was SOOOOO popular!) she said she was trying to see my painting...I subbed in that class the other day and left some pictures for the kids to color, and she was trying to see...I hope I get this right...if I did other kinds of art. So, here you go Edna! These are some I did for our living room because the previous ones had grown boring.

This one I did once we got back from CA...circa 2007

This pear is the first one, I like it better than the Apple. I did this one in CA. Cora's job includes juicing such fruits, so it was my intention to showcase those.

But my paintings are not all I do. Below you see the diorama I built for my small ships. The diorama is only 5 inches by 7 inches...everything but some of the ships are hand made and painted. This diorama currently resides at the McCalister Air Museum...if you get a chance swing by. I originally just wanted to share it with a couple people who volunteer there...but ended up leaving it for a time. When I came back to reclaim it one of the gentlemen there had built a stand and put up a plaquard describing it...I decided to leave it a little longer...pride, I suppose.

My dad enjoys HO scale trains. I built this water tower for him for Christmas a couple years ago. Every piece made by me...well, shaped and painted by me. The engine is his...I needed something for scale.

Then in 2007 I built him this shop building...not the best photo, but it looked pretty good.

Then last February, for his birthday, I bought a few train cars and then proceeded to vandalize them. I used a small paint brush and emmulated the graffiti you see on them in real life. Surprisingly, they don't sell them like that. They turned out very nicely. He was happy and surprised. I don't have photos of those, though...

So, yeah, I do other things. Thanks for reading the blog! And Happy Chinese New Year!!!!