Year of The Dog

It's Chinese New Year and my phones haven't stopped ringing! Relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends... the killer calls are the ones from a couple time zones apart, waking you up with enthusiastic "Xin Nien Huai Le"s while you grope around trying to place the receiver on your ear.

If that doesn't prove a health hazard, the monster eating sprees would soon settle that score. Food, food and more food! Increasingly, Chinese New Year has become an excuse to just pig out shamelessly (and thereafter forking out another bundle of moola to gorge our bodies in super slimming therapies to rid the guilt). How much more decadent can we get?

Anyways, I didn't eat much this year coz I was still recovering from flu, plus the fact that I wasn't in the mood for celebration. I've got a couple of angpows though, so that's not too bad. And I could see some good things happening - three of my aunts have responded positively to me taking them to church next Sunday (I hadda wrench them out from their very tight weekend mahjong schedule). I mean, these are aunts who had seen how impossibly bratty and spoiled I was as a young child.... so I guess they wanna check out just what kinda institution could "religionise" a person like me. Whatever.

Today I gotta get stuff from the market so we could cook for a deluge of relatives coming tomorrow, on top of my cousin and his girlfriend who's staying overnight tonight. I love having people around the house (so long as they don't try to matchmake me).

This being the lunar Year of the Canine really brings back wistful
memories of my three dachsunds, all of whom died in the same year. Two were run over by cars, and one died of old age. There were many visits to the vet and I wished I had known about dog insurance back then. Just that pet insurance wasn't very popular. These days, people are more market-savvy and would definitely shop around and compare to settle for the best pet insurance in town.

But hey, Chinese New Year is the time for celebration, rejoicing and of course the big feast!!! And who knows, I may recover and get myself Dachshund #4.