Happy New Year!

It's already nearly midnight for my friends in Japan, so I'd better wish you all a happy new year now, before I forget or get too busy knitting/watching silly movies with A-L/eating jelly beans/making mapo tofu for my family.

I'm at A-L's place at the moment, and she told me I was free to wake her up after 8:30, which was five minutes ago. But I'll be generous and let her sleep a little longer. At least until I finish this. ^_^

I've been back a week, and have spent most of that time eating with family and friends. In other words, it's been great! I feel like a blob -- a warm, happy, well fed blob.

A-L and I spent the day together yesterday (we saw Black Swan, which I'll write about later) and went grocery shopping before coming back to her place. We bought... a lot of movie-watching supplies, including several flavours of chips, two different kinds of chocolate chip cookies, two different kinds of cream cheese, English muffins, Habitant vegetable soup, and cretons! I'd forgotten cretons even existed until a couple of days ago, but the recollection of them was enough to think that my trip wouldn't be complete without some.

... I just looked up cretons and it seems they're a Quebec thing, and I guess they sound really unappetizing if you've never had them. XD;;; They're good, I swear! It's like pâté without the snobbiness!

The only thing I haven't yet ticked off on my list of foods to eat is poutine. I had some at Harvey's when we went to pick up B2, but chain restaurant poutine doesn't really count. It's gotta be S&G Fries or Pataterie Hulloise!

All right, I'd better stop writing about food, because no one will ever want to eat out with me again for fear of offending my high-class palate. Anyway, it's almost nine, so it's time to wake up the hostess! :D

The one thing I must do today is post my pictures of Zurich to Travelpod, because that's the very last entry I must make if I want to get rid of my backlog. Now I need to figure out where the USB ports are on this computer so I can upload the pictures!

Counting Down...

... about 40 minutes until 2011, so let's make this quick.

I've spent this past week eating pretty much non-stop, what with the stockpiles of chocolates and cookies that my mother brought out, huge restaurant meals, and all the junk food A-L and I consumed over the course of the day. I feel like I'll need to eat nothing but steamed vegetables for two weeks to clean out my system! *fail*

I've already done the "year in review" post, or at least the meme version of it. There's other stuff I want to write about, but there's no way that's going to happen until I'm back in Tokyo with Tabitha purring on my lap, so I've decided to reschedule New Year's.

Sure, I'll toast 2011 at midnight, but my own personal 2011 will begin on the 6th. By then, I'll have hopefully gotten over the worst of the jet lag and the fatigue of my trip back home and will have had time to properly formulate my plan of attack for the coming year.

The 6th is Epiphany, and though I've never celebrated "la fête des rois" myself, I claim the right to use it based on my French-Canadian bloodline. Hell, even my Anglo father said that he did the whole "galette des rois"* thing with my mother's family a few times, before I was born.

So Epiphany will be the day to officially kick things off, perhaps with a visit to the doctor and a ballet class. We'll see! Perhaps I'll even have some sort of personal epiphany, like discover how to actually get done all the things I want to do. ^_^;

In the meantime, I wish you all a happy new year, whether you've already rung it in or not, and can't wait to see you all again in 2011! <3

* A bean or a coin is baked into the cake, and the person who gets the slice with the bean/coin is crowned king or queen for the day.