By the time I blog again, it will likely be the new year – that is, it will be the new Chi­nese year. The year of the Ox is upon us. In Chi­nese tra­di­tion, Monica and I worked to clean house today. We’ll finish up tomorrow.

There are many tra­di­tions and super­sti­tions sur­rounding the passing of one year into the next. Many of those super­sti­tions have to do with the words for things and their lucky or unlucky homo­phones in the Chi­nese lan­guage. For example, the word for fish is sounds like the word for “sur­plus” (I think). There­fore, it is tra­di­tional to have some kind of fish (and it needs to be the whole fish) for dinner the night before the new year. And that’s just one of many rules to follow to max­i­mize your good luck and min­i­mize your bad luck in the coming year.

Found online: The Patron Tequila web­site. It was fea­tured in the cur­rent Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts mag­a­zine. I spent some time looking through it today, learning about how tequila is made and get­ting sug­ges­tions for cock­tails. It’s a fun website.