新年快乐

Happy (Chinese) New Year!!

Before going to Taiwan Chinese New Year was just something that I heard in passing, but since being there and celebrating in person it is something that I will celebrate for now on. My roommates were just as excited to get involved with it so we went all out :)

It was Anna's night to make dinner and she went with chicken fried rice...

The rice had to be completely cool according to her recipe so we rigged up a good way to get the rice cooling while we went grocery shopping :)

The finished DELICIOUS fried rice!

All the food...not only did we have fried rice but we added dumplings (potstickers) and egg rolls.

We even took our hand at chopsticks (Candace and I may or may not have ran to Panda Express and asked for several sets of chopsticks while the car was parked illegally so that I could run in :D). I was so impressed with how long Candace was willing to try the chopsticks...she had said that she was going to last all of 5 minutes trying them and she almost went the whole meal!

Anna had a creative way of using her chopsticks

Janet had a little more experience using chopsticks and looked like an old pro!

Ciara was the first to dig into the yummy fortune cookies!

This cracked me...I'm taking suggestions

Our "Asian-y" picture

We ended our night with a good ole classic from Disney... got to love Mulan :D

The Sock That Is No More

So yesterday morning Andrea woke up with a really really sore neck and it continued to progressively get worse throughout the day, I suggested that she make a rice sock to help loosen the muscles so that maybe she could turn her neck. When we went to the store we bought some long socks and came home and filled it with rice (from the freezer :D). Andrea used it once and it really seemed to help a little so she put it back in the microwave to heat it up again.
We were watching our movie when I smelled something, I looked up to see the kitchen filled with smoke, I ran across the kitchen and pulled open the microwave and black smoke came rushing out at me. I couldn't breathe because it was so bad. We quickly grabbed all the fans and put them on, hoping to clear out the air. We're not sure what happened, but I like to describe what it looked like when we opened the microwave as "the rice pooped out of the sock, like a black charcoal ball"