Bye-bye to My Year

Happy New Year, all! It's the first day of the new year of the ox. If you're an ox (which you are if you're born a multiple of 12 years back from this year), you're supposed to be dependable, hardworking, logical and modest. You can also be stubborn and materialistic.

... Yeah, that pretty much describes what you would imagine as an anthropomorphic ox. Anyway, marrying into a Chinese family, this sort of thing was always a favorite past-time. My mother-in-law (with help from *her* mother-in-law) would run through all the attributes of one or another of the kids based on their zodiac animal, and we'd all laugh about who matched their description. Then there was the inevitable match-making round where their zodiac was compared to that of their significant other.*

Either way, the Chinese New Year would end in eating lots of food, especially chicken (I don't know why) and little peanut butter pastries I forget the name of. In the last few years, the family hasn't gotten together as much, but I still enjoy thinking about it and hoping it'll happen again. Maybe one day I'll attempt to make the peanut butter things. (Probably not.)

*Jon and I, as a pig and rat respectively, got the stamp of approval.

Our Life

My entire semester was summed up in a binder and an afternoon today - i.e. a trial notebook and some awesome cross examinations. Yes, kids - it was Big Trial day. We actually won, closing out the PC season for team ALV & Yee at 3-1. More important than that - it is OVER. Woo! A weight has lifted. I was literally grinning in the car and then babbled into the phone to my mother for ages, hardly taking the time to breathe.

Now we have 2 1/2 weeks to... outline, study and try to pass the final exam. Wait a minute...

Skewed Priorities

The apartment complex caught fire today. Not my section, but a neighboring one. Apparently, even kitchen fires (I assume it was something minor like that, as firefighters were quickly switching out of 'oh noes!!!1!!' mode) require the entire Waco Fire Department to show up. No less than FOUR firetrucks showed up, plus the fire chief's SUV. I mean, I know it's not always indicative of the severity of the fire, but I didn't see smoke. I also saw the trucks pulling away 5 minutes later. The girls whose apartment it was were running around like Armageddon had decided to pay a personal visit though.

The thing is - I wasn't that interested. I was running late for class. The most pressing thing on my mind was how likely it would be that my professor accepted the excuse of "my apartment complex caught on fire and the firetrucks were blocking the only exit gate". And then I could only thank God that those girls decided to light their place on fire *after* PC, not before...