Amazing how much excitement can happen since my last posting. Well first off, Gung Hay Fat Choi!!! Chinese New Years kick off started yesterday. I have decided to fast from meat since yesterday until Feb 16th. Being vegetarian is a bitch! However, Sala Thai down the street makes amazing vegetarian. They can turn any of their dishes to vegetarian. They substitute meat for tofu. I ordered vegetarian pad thai and it was great.


Today, I went to the temple to celebrate Chinese New Years. I took lots of photos. I went with cousin Don, Nam, brother Peter and his girlfriend Marian. Yes, shocking news. First mention of my brother ever on ModernRomeo.net. That's not the only shocking news. However, I will expand on that subject perhaps in another entry. For now, I just want to say it's a new year: forgiveness is the best gift you could give to yourself. We had a lot of fun at the temple. We burned a lot of incense, prayed and gave thanks. We took a lot of photos and videos. Yes, they will be posted soon. My goal was to visit the remains of my grandmother. However, a Sister told me I'd have to speak to the head monk, but we'd have to wait for an hour until the ceremony is over. We ate vegetarian food that was given at the temple. We were served salad, vegetarian chow mien, rice and soup. When I returned to ask the head monk to see my grandmother's remains, he says because it's New Years, the remains are not open to the public. I must make a private appointment. Disappointing, however, we burned incense at the temple's pagoda in her honor.


Aunt Chi, Nancy, Uncle Li, Todd and cousins Eric, Ivan and Jade came down to pay a visit. I haven't seen them in so long. I handed out money in red envelopes (lee si) to the little kids. I also got to see Gramma.


So something out of left field: I decided to no longer see Antonio. Antonio and I seem to have communication issues. Antonio and I made plans exactly a month ago to be each other's Valentine's date, but I ended up having Valentine's dinner with someone else. This guy I met through a mutual friend. It took me a very long time to actually start talking to him, but things ended up to just turn out the way it did. He's in interesting character. We had dinner last night and based on our conversation, he remembered that I have never flown a kite and it's on my bucket list. He got me two kites for Valentine's Day and want to cross #11 off my list on Thursday. I got him two books: "A Walk To Remember" and "The Notebook" since he said he have never read them. We went to Tamaya's for vegetarian sushi. It's so cute that he have been eating vegetarian with me. The vegetarian sushi rolls was pretty good, but I would kill myself if I could never eat real sushi again. Then we trotted of to have frozen yogurt where Vining and josh walked in. He got to meet one of the BFF sooner than expected. It was fun. I'm excited to see where this leads. More news and explanations to come.


I now must crash. Happy Chinese New Years and Happy Valentine's Day!