Ship's Log, Day One, Year 2013

The fascist condo board wants me to take my tree out by Jan. 4,  Friday, in order to have it carted away for free. Never mind that Christmas ends on Jan. 6,  I am SO traditional,  and that I (like most working persons) have planned that weekend, 5/6, (or maybe the next, or the next) to put all the ornaments and such back in my storage locker (which I have to call condo security to open for me).

And a lovely tree it has been, with new memories, including scaring the catshit out of the Yellow Emperor with the beautiful glass ornament that looks just like his head. (Really, he looked at it and went into hiding.)  Never mind that he's also been hiding under the bed since last night's fireworks. Bad holiday for Lao Hu.

I think you could call this spooky

Not to be mocking me!

New Year's Day is when I start to clean up after the festivities, put the presents away, purify myself with sauerkraut and kielbasa.  (Although that tree stays till the Sixth!)  Among the presents, my very creative and clever and thematically inclined Santa gifted me with these:

The earrings are a little young for my taste, but very kawaii, and the book...also Japanese in origin...is hilarious, but I hope never to have the time (or desire) to make finger puppets out of cat fleece. I brush Fifi, la plus belle chatte de la maison,  regularly, and she is prolific (and grateful), but this is more than I care to do. (Although there was a period in my Appalachian back-to-the-land era I collected enough dryer lint to make a substantial bed rest pillow.  I wish I still had that. Cat hair finger puppets?  I could have made a lint scarecrow.)

The Sylvester flash drive however is pretty cool: who would have thought, in the heady days of  Univac, I could put a 4 GB plastic pussycat on my keychain.

Year of Snake is coming on fast; it feels a little like Tiger to me.  But, Lao Hu, your time was three years ago.

And this has nothing to do really with anything above, except that it is a cat...from a carousel I watched during my November Oregon holiday.  I loved this particular critter.  I would have hung it on the tree too, if I could have.

Gong Xi Nimen Fa Cai!

Or as we more commonly say in Honolulu, kung hee fat choy (Cantonese).  The year of the water dragon --shui long-- is upon us.  So I put some hot water in my longjin (dragon well) tea this morning and started the year off right.

Breakfast with the dragons.

This is what fresh dragon well tea looks like, in a glass with a bit of dried orange peel.

Dragon well (longjin) tea in Hangzhou.

Alas, my Chinese painting class has been cancelled due to low enrollment. And my teacher is apparently not well. I am at a loss. Still, tonight I will attempt to paint a dragon.

The Chinese dragon is not like the dragons of Western mythology.  They are auspicious, strong, and generally don't have wings.  They are composites of nine animals, in variations with the head of an ox, horse or camel (works for me); the body of a snake with fish scales, tiger feet and eagle claws, horns of a deer, eyes of a rabbit, belly of a frog, mouse whiskers. If there are wings, they are the wings of a bat, and just a pair near the front legs.  The status of the dragon--whether he is for commoners or the emperor-- is indicated by how many claws he has. He often is depicted with a pearl in his mouth or just within reach.  The pearl is a symbol of good luck and prosperity.  It is especially good to have nine dragons flying around.  Speaking of the fish scales, he is supposed to have 117: 81 yang and 36 yin. Even though this is the year of the water dragon, they are generally associated with water anyway and will fly from the sea to the clouds and back.  On a feng shui tour in Hong Kong once, I was shown how the surrounding hills are OBVIOUSLY nine dragons.  And more than a few buildings there feature gaps so the dragon can fly through without obstruction. So they say.

Dragon Gate Apartments.

And one of my favorite little temples in Wudangshan features a nice spirit screen with a fresco of nine dragons.  It's very old and "in need" of restoration, but I hope they don't overdo it.

Nine dragon spirit screen at Tai Chang Temple, Wudangshan

Here's a closeup of one of the faded nine.  I think I can do this well with my brush.

Going for the pearl!

Here's a sturdier dragon--there were nine on this wall-- from Po Lin Buddhist Monastery in Hong Kong.

Dragon at Po Lin in Hong Kong.

So 2012 is here in earnest.  No dragon your feet!  Get on with it!

Yang New Year

"Leave the horses in the wagon, it's all downhill from here..."

"The fireworks are over, only the smoke remains, clouding my great crystal balls."

--The Firesign Theatre, "I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus."

After being awakened a few minutes before midnight (somehow I was actually sleeping through hours of the war zone sounds of Hawaii fireworks, the way I always fell asleep on my Grandmother's mohair sofa while all the uncles and aunts and parents were carousing), we made our annual champagne toast and out on the lanai I banged my Chinese opera gong (timing precisely monitored by the Wizard's new iPhone's atomic clock app, I knew he was gonna get weird with this stuff).  Three midnight gong bangs  --the only time I am permitted to irritate my neighbors. I hope I woke up the noisy Russians downstairs.

This morning I observed the progress of the Christmas cactus that started to set blossoms at the winter solstice.  I can't imagine what this New Year has in store, but I have confidence that whatever it is, I can cope. The cactus year after year thrives and blooms; why not me?

"Ahhh!," the swami says, "The balls are clearing again. The right one is the Sun, and the left one is the Moon. Put what you want between them, and your future begins."

Great dope humor of the '70s!

Starting to Begin Again

I once edited a monthly progress report for a scientist I worked for who had written the astonishing and confidence-building reassurance, "We are starting to begin the preparations to plan the event, an activity that will continue for several months." I don't know if that satisfied the government agency funding the project, but it did make the subsequent editing easy: I just struck out a level of planning each month until the event happened all by itself. That seemed ludicrous to me then, but now, on Gregorian/Solar New Year's Day 2009 it seems like a great approach. I will be using the next three weeks to get ready for the next New Year's event, Chinese Lunar New Year, beginning Jan. 26.

This is a grace period during which I recover from the festivities and feasting and fund depletion that started at Thanksgiving. The solstice happened (all by itself) while we observed our wedding anniversary with a dinner at a favorite restaurant at our favorite table. Later I started shopping and creating gifts for the girls in the office: I made 52 pairs of earrings, most of which look like hippie-styled Christmas ornaments. (Well, they are, really.)

I added a pan to the Wizard's All-Clad collection, but had the most fun on Christmas Eve at the hardware store. Here comes a suggestion to women who are stymied by their SO's practical nature. What to give a renaissance man who loves soldering irons and socket wrenches? (My artist friend says that tools for guys are the same as makeup for gals...you can never have too many brushes or eye shadow colors.) I had tried to go to our local hardware store, the venerable and charitable 100-year-old City Mill (eschewing Home Depot and Lowe's, those carpetbaggers) the evening before but arrived just at closing. The clerks were moving all the outside displays into the already darkened store. I asked what the hours were for Christmas Eve. One of the guys looked at me compassionately and said, "If there's something you NEED right now, I can still get it for you." If my toilet was running or I needed a new deadbolt, he would have made the effort to help me. I told him I was just planning to browse the aisles for guy-stocking stuffers, but I would be back next day. I believe had I been at one of the big-box stores I would not have gotten that genuine concern. That's why I like to shop local.

So next day I spent an hour pulling all kinds of odd weird cheap things off the City Mill racks--colored cable ties and etching tools and some Dremel bits, drill stops (a BIG hit!) and various glues. I had to ask for some assistance, and it may have been from the same guy I talked to the night before. Boy was he impressed with the haul in my cart! "Lucky guy," he said. And, now I know my way around City Mill! I got this notion because the Wizard usually loads my stocking with office supplies, the funny kind things you never buy for yourself, but eventually come in handy. Colored paper clips, map pins, post-its, hi-lighters, strange tapes and pens. He probably goes to Office Depot, but I forgive him: he also includes mini-bottles of single-malts and chocolates.

On the first day of Christmas I was delighted to find something under the tree I hadn't ever received as a young girl, not being quite in the right demographic at the time for a Barbie Doll. And there it was (I had pointed it out to Santa because it was so funny), Tippi Hedren, Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" Barbie, complete with attacking crows and nice stiletto shoes. Now I want a custom Barbie, "Baroness Counting Kolea." She will come complete with a white Mazda Miata (license TAO 61), 32 makeup brushes and an mini-nano-Barbie iPOD.

And last night, New Year's Eve, and the 7th day of Christmas (yes, the 12 days of Christmas come AFTER Dec. 25) my true love gave to me an obscure and hard-to-find Alibris-sourced book which I regrettably discarded when we moved to Hawaii: The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe: An occasionally indecent exploration of the sexual history of feet and footwear, published in the U.S. by Penthouse Press, but originally by a British house (it figures) in 1976. (I had discarded the Penthouse version; now I have the British one.) Written by William A. Rossi, a podiatrist who one suspects was also a bit of a foot fetishist, it is a fascinating treatise on the largely erotic significance of shoes, with sections on Chinese footbinding, stilettos, biker boots, and the people who love shoes. Since I always notice shoes, and have quite a collection of footwear, I was delighted to have this book back. (I would be even more delighted if I could still wear my Ferragamo stilettos and restore the black patent leather on my 3.5 inch Bally's; alas chronic plantar's fasciitis quite likely caused by those beautiful shoes obviates my indulgence. I am doomed to protect my Bubbling Well point with Tevas, Chacos, Crocs and Naturalizers! All very fine and comfortable, but utterly sexless shoes. Well, some of the Naturalizers are cute.) The ironic thing, I was a little late getting home last night because I had stopped at Macy's (which used to be the venerable and local Liberty House) to buy...some shoes. And I have an appointment this weekend to get a pedicure.

So this morning, after another of the season's dramatic series of dark and stormy nights (Dec. 26th's responsible in part for the power outage that made national news only because Obama was on-island) I am considering The Resolutions. No more extravagant shopping (which is why I bought all those shoes last night), eating right, getting exercise (walking in the Tevas), meditating to mitigate all these worldly desires, treasuring my friends, working smart, clearing clutter (yeah, right, see Yin post, A Perfect Mess). This year, which is coming to a close but not today, the Year of the Earth Rat, was the appropriate year for me, the Fire Pig, to start fresh. And I did. But today, anticipating the approaching Year of the Earth Ox, I start to begin it all again...an activity that will continue for several months.