year

(photo: stack of homemade dorayaki, Doraemon’s favorite snack)

oh, boy… today was absolutely the craziest day. when i woke up in the morning, all i could see was the whole white world. on the weather channel, there was a blizzard warning covering almost all of saskatchewan. the strong wind and the blowing snow completely blocked the view from my apartment window. i couldn’t see across the street.

i spent my afternoon drawing, but i got distracted by the noise of the strong wind so many times that i had to take a break a couple of times. we have some plastic chairs and a patio table on the balcony and they kept getting blown around. they were wild. one of the chairs got blown into the corner of the balcony and kept banging its head against the railing — it looked like self-mutilation.

anyway, this wild canadian weather almost made me forget that it’s a special day here — it’s the 1st anniversary of my blog! my very first post was one of my loud silence photos. for that first month, the only people who knew about my blog were me and paul :D i didn’t tell anyone about it until february, around the time i was setting up my solo drawing show. at that point, i was getting about 20 visitors per day (now it’s 250, average).

i’ve had so much fun with this blog for one year. i’ve met lots of interesting and nice people — thank you to those of you who leave comments or wrote to me using my contact page. some days were really exciting here, like the time that i got linked from metafilter and the site crashed. since then, paul redesigned my blog and i opened my shop and my gallery.

there will be a couple of new things happening in the new year. i’m preparing for a show this spring that i’ll be writing about. there will be some more updates here, including moving to a new server. and i have some personal news that i’ll be blogging about, and showing photos.

so, thank you for coming to visit. let’s have another great year!

happy new year, everyone!

i hope your 2007 is filled with joy and excitement :)

these are two happy boiled eggs that i peeled and dyed pink. i sliced off part of the tip and added happy faces, using black sesame seeds for the eyes and food colouring for the mouths. i got the idea from a japanese website that shows how to make osechi ryori, the traditional new year’s meal. of course, pink eggs with happy faces are not traditional at all. but we like to use bright colored food for decoration on the serving dish. and red and white are the colors of good fortune for new year’s and any occasion.

the chef made these with quail eggs, but i didn’t have any so i used ordinary eggs. they sat happily on my osechi ryori plate. paul said they were too cute to eat, so they’re back in the refrigerator tonight. i might have to surgically remove their faces so we can eat the rest of the egg.

i’ll be posting pictures and recipes from more of my osechi ryori dishes this week.