Chinese New Year

Xing nian kuai le! (literally: "may you have many children with 10 fingers and 10 toes") This weekend was Chinese New Year, and wow! I was so busy running around campus. Chinese Yo-Yo Club performed a bit, the Taiwanese group had a nice shindig, the Chinese group had a better-funded shindig, and I grazed on huo guo foods for 3 hours this afternoon, helping out with the Asian Culture Center's event (I cooked food and ate--er--tested it to make sure it was cooked). Needless to say, my free food binge turned out unimaginably successful. Phuc and Alex came down for the Chinese New Year program. $20 worth of gas for some free food. Totally worth it, haha. Phuc and Icey have nice summaries up, so I won't rewrite what's already been published. After the Cranium game at Andrew's, Brett, Lisa, and I trekked through the freezing rain to try to find Brett's car. "Where is it?" "I don't see it!" "It was right here!" "Hm, maybe it got towed" "Sign: Permit Parking Only" "Crap." At first, the towing company didn't even answer the phone. They were probably all too busy out towing cars to answer the phone. Eventually, they answered, and we got the car back. After paying $95. Ouch. Poor Brett, it seems like someone's out to get him be "towing" all his possessions. His bike, his jacket, now, even his car! Predatory towing really pisses me off now. It's up there with speedtraps on my list of things to abolish when I rule the world. Interestingly enough, NYT published an article on predatory towing not too long ago:

In one case here, a church's pickup was towed from its own parking lot; in another, a 4-year-old boy was towed away in his mother's car after she went inside her apartment for a few minutes to drop off groceries and a younger child. And a man who ran alongside a tow truck, pleading to get his vehicle back after it was towed from a fire lane, died when he slipped and was run over by the truck and then his own Chevrolet Suburban.