New Year Snow and Tea Parties
First of all, let me just say that I’m most certainly not a morning person. During weekends or holidays, I usually always snooze until around 2 in the afternoon. I go to bed at 2-4AM so basically, I’ve been getting 12+ hours of sleep for these past two weeks. Oooh, so maybe that’s why I haven’t been getting any work done… 
Even when I was young, my sleeping pattern was always screwed up like that and I was never able to voluntarily wake up early without someone slapping me across the face.
Since today is the very last day of 2009, I decided to break the cycle. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of sleeping through the whole celebration of New Years Eve, so I woke up early for once. How? By not sleeping at all. Sleeping = no chance of having a warm breakfast and no chance seeing the sun rise (not that the grey sky will let any rays peek out anyway)
But the point is, I woke up! By myself! Of my own free will! 
And so this is what I did…
Went down to the kitchen and saw this on the fridge:
Horrible picture and unclear writing, but it says, “Hey guys! Please clean up! It’s 2010! - Mom” 
Her daily fridge notes always have the same basic message: do your chores.
Then went to the kitchen table and laughed at this:
You probably can’t tell, but that isn’t a real bowl of chicken! It’s actually a piggy coin bank given to my younger brother as an xmas gift. I suspect that it was all part of my brother’s evil scheme to put it beside the real food just to trick us. LOL
Next, I braved the cold and went outside! 
Leaving the house during wintertime to just breathe is another thing I don’t often do. I’m a ‘summer’ person, so I become such a scrooge during the colder months and just hide indoors.
But then I remembered how loooooong winter’s going to last, so I thought, why not at least try and make friends with it?
After enjoying a few minutes outside, I came back into the kitchen and noticed the cute pink tea set we have (don’t you just love it when you spot something you always overlook, and suddenly realize its potential?). I took it down from where it sits on top of the fridge, washed it a few times (it’s been coated with dust for many years now) and feeling decidedly girly, I resolved to have my own mini tea-party 
...with myself!
Since no one in my family drinks tea, I had a lot of flavors to choose from. In the end, I chose Tazo Awake Black Tea. Admittedly, the beautiful packaging it came in was a huge factor in my decision 
To be honest, this was only the second time in my life I ever brewed my own tea, so unsurprisingly, I made the mistake of using water that wasn’t hot enough and I steeped the bag for too long. 
Oh well
Of course you can’t have a tea-party without shortbread cookies and delicious biscuits! The one on the left is a chocolate almond “thin biscuit fin - biscotti style”. Don’t know what that means but it sounds fancy!
Seeing how long this entry has gotten, I think I’ll end it here.
2009 was definitely a wonderful year for me in spite of some inevitable roadblocks. Let’s all just give ourselves some well-deserved pats on the back for making it through another year. Cheers to 2010!! 
