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Sunday, February 14, 2010 Gong Xi Fa Cai! Kung Hei Fat Choy! Or: Happy Chinese New Year!  This lovely drawing was sent to me by U! in Mexico City. Check out more of his fantastic work at Garabatorama. Labels: holidays ^ Top | 7:43 AM | | | 
Friday, December 25, 2009 Merry Christmas! "The worst gift is a fruitcake. There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other." - Johnny Carson  Merry Christmas everyone! Labels: holidays ^ Top | 3:57 PM | | |
Tuesday, December 08, 2009 Christmas Lights! It's starting to feel like Christmas - I'm listening to Over the Rhine's Snow Angels  as I type, and today it snowed. I'm writing Christmas cards and finally put up decorations in my apartment, and I’ve started to see Christmas lights appearing everywhere. There seem to be more of them this year. Perhaps it’s an antidote to our economic instability?Last year I was using websites to try to track down light displays, but this year I’ve already stumbled across two enormous ones just driving around the city. For those of you in Chicago: there are fantastic light displays on Ashland Ave. somewhere around Irving Park (I was driving by, so I wasn't paying attention to the exact cross street) and Logan Blvd. and Washtenaw (the nearest major cross street is California).  Every year I spend time tracking down lights, so these were a fantastic find. The Lincoln Park Zoo also does a light display, and it's fun because you can walk around and see zoo animals in the process. And there's a wonderful cafe nearby that's good for warming up after walking around in the cold.  ^ Top | 10:58 PM | | |
Thursday, November 26, 2009 Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy your turkey! And for the adventurous or vegetarian, a special drink in honor of the holiday (yes, it is real - Conan O'Brien's staff ahem, loved it):  Cakewrecks also has some fabulous Thanksgiving disasters. My personal favorite is Cthulhu with a headdress. Labels: holidays, Thanksgiving ^ Top | 11:32 PM | | |
Thursday, November 27, 2008 Happy Thanksgiving!  I'll be driving to Michigan tomorrow to celebrate with friends and family, and I'm exceedingly glad to have a much-needed break.Over the last couple of years, my parents have become fans of cooking shows, and in that time period they've also perfected the holiday roast turkey. (The trick? Brining.) It's amazing. While my parents have gotten into the Food Network, I've become a bona fide foodie--Chicago is home to fantastic restaurants, and I always have a long mental list of places to try that have been getting good reviews. I learned long ago that the best way to indulge foodie tendencies without spending much cash is to cook, and my cooking has definitely gotten more gourmet-oriented in the last year or two. (Half the fun in cooking for me is the plating.) It's actually rather inexpensive when you make everything from scratch. In general, the only processed foods I buy are chocolate and ice cream. Everything else--sauces, brownies, even sometimes ladyfingers for tiramisu--I make from their basic ingredients. Making something from a box would be a bit of an offense to my pride at this point. But back to Thanksgiving: my traditional contribution to holiday dinners is dessert, which this year will take the form of individual chocolate souffles with creme anglaise. It'll be a bit of an experiment since I only recently bought ramekins, even though I've been meaning to buy them for ages. Yahoo News has an interesting collection of Thanksgiving stories--it's a feel-good article, but the first piece is well worth reading (it's the Craigslist one). I have a lot to be thankful for this year, and it's easy to forget that in the midst of work and running around to get things done. "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others." - Cicero. Labels: holidays ^ Top | 1:08 AM | | |
Thursday, February 07, 2008 Happy Chinese New Year!  Thanks to U! for the fabulous drawing, which he sent me as a greeting card (if you're wondering, it's the Year of the Rat). Have a fantastic year, filled with lots of friends, music, and real Chinese food! Labels: holidays ^ Top | 7:29 AM | | |
Wednesday, July 04, 2007 Fireworks Imagine cramming 1 million people in maybe 15 blocks as close to Chicago's lakefront as possible for a 25-minute minute show and you'll get a good feel for the annual Independence Day fireworks display (which for reasons unknown is held on the 3rd of July rather than the 4th--the display on the 4th lasts half the time). I've never been in such a crowded space in my life. I like fireworks--who doesn't?--but I don't like them enough to navigate crowds of that magnitude. But an hour before I was going to head home from downtown, Jeremy called me to say that he and his friends had staked out a prime piece of real estate a few feet from the lake. "If you want to see the fireworks without being overcrowded, you should come now--we need more people to fill our space." This was at 5pm. The fireworks started at 9:30pm. Apparently there are people who will camp out by the lake starting in the morning. And from a logistical point of view, there's a good reason: taking a bus, it took over an hour to make a trip that would normally take 15 minutes. I was perhaps 20 ft. from Jeremy and company when I gave up--I couldn't see them, and there was literally nowhere to move. Not to the front, not to the right, not to the left. And all around, people's cell phones weren't working very well even though the signal strength was high (too many people for the tower to handle, I guess). I ended up sitting on the grass behind a couple that said they were only a few feet from their family--they'd left to get something to eat, couldn't push their way back, and were sitting on another family's blanket. We ended up sharing drinks and pizza and watching the display in that semi-awkward, friendly companionability of strangers who are half-united by circumstance. When the fireworks were over I found my friends and we decided to walk one stop south on the L, thinking it'd be less crowded. Wrong. It was impossible to even get into the station.* So we walked to the stop a mile and a half from where we'd started--and ended up in the same train as people we knew. For all its size, Chicago can be surprisingly small. * Actually, I was impressed: in the time it took us to walk about a mile, the L went from being so crowded you couldn't step inside the station to nearly empty. Not bad. ^ Top | 1:17 AM | | |
Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Gong Xi Fa Cai Shark's fin soup. Roast duck. The Chinese New Year's Eve reunion dinner is always one of the best meals of the year. It's also usually the only time I can convince my mom to make one of my favorite dishes in the world, shark's fin soup (at $35-60 a bowl in a restaurant, it's easily one of the most expensive gourmet food items you can find). My brother also made the trek back to our parents' house (just over an hour of driving for him, a flight from LA for me) and ended up taking a large portion of food home with him since he was hosting dinner for friends the next day. However, he says he actually did end up cooking most of that meal, not entirely relying on Mom's skills. I stayed in Michigan for the weekend and was able to briefly catch up with some friends, including the newly-engaged Ricke. Apparently I was out of loop, because he proposed to his Irish girlfriend months ago. I'm excited for him. However, it is rather amusing to note that he and his fiancee have only been in the same country for a total of eight days throughout the course of knowing each other. Even more amusing is the fact that one of his brothers also picked up an Irish girlfriend (though he was Ireland for a few months, and thus it's more "normal"). "We had to travel overseas to find women who would put up with us!" Now they just need to get the last brother in on the deal. Nothing like a global romance to breed stories to tell the grandchildren. Labels: holidays ^ Top | 1:55 AM | | |
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