Today is the first day of the New Year, the year of the cat to our Vietnamese calendar. I woke up early in the morning and could not get back to sleep again. After my routine of exercise in the morning, my wife and I went to the kitchen to prepare for breakfast. Her breakfast is always the same, a big cup of coffee in which more than three fourth is soy milk. She never eats anything in the morning, and still get fat (according to her). I am very opposite. I always have a pretty big breakfast in any standard. I can eat as early as three o'clock in the morning. It could be anything ... solid. A big bowl of boiling hot noodles is the best, but for the worse, I can take a big bowl of rice with any left over would be just fine with me. I am a very easy eater.
I don't drink coffee at all. I had a terrible experience with coffee once when I was sixteen, then I never bother with it again in my life. I remembered that I had to stay late sturdy for my exam. I asked my brother to buy me a cup of coffee, and after I finished drinking it, I was not only stay awake for a few hours, but it kept me awake for almost three days and nights straight with a constant mild stomachache which could not go away. I felt so terrible during the whole time. I could not sleep even though I was extremely tired. I fell to my unconscious state on my third night due to exhaustion. From then on, coffee is not on my enjoyment list.
I did not know until my daughter came to wish me a happy new year and asked for a "red envelope"!
After that, my wife and her went to ... work as usual. What a way of celebrating the new year. In this country, if the lunar new year falls into a week day, then nobody will celebrate. Or if you live in a town which doesn't have a large population of Asian, then there will be no celebrating lunar new year either.
I missed the Lunar New Year celebration this year. We had planned for the trip back to Viet Nam in time for this, but something else came up caused us to cancel the plan. One of our restaurant needs to be renovated. We had planned way ahead, but we ran into a bunches of architectural problems. Then the coordination and accommodation between the land lord, the franchise, the architecture, and the city engineering and planning departments set us back a couple of months. We can't leave until late February. Our vacation has been on hold since, and we haven't had a fixed date yet. It's probably going to be in the later weeks of February or else the weather in Viet Nam is going unbearable hot.
My God daughter has just called to wish me the best wishes for the new year on her way to work. It's a great feeling when someone who is not an immediate member of your family still remember to call you. I can't wait to get back to California to give her a big hug. I stopped everything to call my mom and dad to wish them as well. They get stuck in Houston the last couple of weeks to help out one of my younger brother in his expanded business. Now they could not go back to California due to one of the biggest snowstorm of the century swept by the mid west of the US. They are forced to celebrate the new year way away from home.
What are we going to do on the very first day of our new year?
Nothing, my daughter asked us out for dinner tonight, and that's it.
We did not even have "banh chung" or "banh tet" to celebrate this year. Oh well, thank God for his blessing, and hope we all have a wonderful year.
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