We've got a couple of pens in both the shape and form of fish, with shiny eyes and frozen expression and all. I don't know why anybody would want to use a pen that's the tail of a fish. It's creative but not in the least practical. People might shriek if it falls out of your purse, for example.
I've done a lot of celebrating over the week by whizzing around town with Mel back, and decorating the house for the Christmas party today/yesterday. It was amusing hanging snowflakes from the ceiling and arranging fake holly - as if to show our actual sentiments we had no Christmas tree. We haven't had one for years. This is perhaps the first time we're actually bothering to decorate the house. It takes an event to have a reason. Today I have to get up really early and go to church and celebrate properly, and it's difficult to have to have a holiday season so rich and green and blank sometimes.
(I suddenly thought of my mum accidentally seeing someone's blog and criticizing his propensity to whine. I wonder if she would find my blog as such, and if she would see the reason for it at all. I don't think I would be able to explain it in words, either. Which just sounds as if I cannot explain anything.)
We drank in Cheek's not-so-horror army stories, ate a lot of pasta, salad, mashed potatoes, and various meats (turkey actually is just salty chicken), and had a fun gift exchange. I hope we did not encourage Yu-Hsin to smoke. I was a bit worried about clashes in the various groups of friends a la Cheek's description of secret-society glares, but it went smoothly enough. It was great to see the guitar people again; the last meeting was perhaps way back in August. My mum lit a zillion candles around the house, which was lovely, although I with my wu-ya zhui insisted we'd have a fire, and we almost did after knocking over one.
Right now I'm thinking about eating ice-cream at Serene Centre and going home as the Umbrella Guard.