Belated New Year Post...

Hello! Hello! I hope everyone is having a good start to 2010! Yours truly is a bit spent at the moment. After years of going to no parties at all, I went to 4 (plus a cozy little get-together with friends) in the two weeks span of Christmas and New Year holidays. A very interesting experience, but one I can now happily put in the 'done that' category and retire back into my more comfortably boring loner mode for the rest of the year. But first thing first, here's a look at what the streets around here looked like at night for 4 weeks or so...


Some San Diegans sure know how to light up their neighborhood!


My flatmate and I went walking about Upas St. in North Park and then Ellingham St. in Rancho Penasquitos during the Christmas weekend, then drove by a particularly well lighted street in Point Loma over New Year. They had the lights on from sundown to about 10PM or so... Pretty good show of the holiday spirits after a rough economic year!


Shots of the much publicized New Year blue moon were taken, of course. La luna was rather disappointingly small for my taste, though she was still quite an effective howl-inspirer.

Sorry, no recording was made of my wolf-ihood, so I'll supplement your imagination of what could have (but surely didn't) sounded when I looked up on the clear year-changing night sky to see the full silvery orb with...


Adrienne Pieczonka's rendition of the Moon Song from Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka, the operatic treatment of the beloved story of the Little Mermaid who gives up her voice in the quest for humanhood and her beloved prince.



It's been a few weeks since the festivities, but I'm still feeling like a bloated blimp. These are some of the varied cuisines I helped to demolished over the holidays: a tableful of savory Filipino food (I was told what they are, but my brain retains nothing :o( ), juicy honey ham (3 of the parties served that and we took home a chunk of left-over), an authentic gingerbread house... without any child-eating witch inside!

It took us 3 weeks to finish off all the left-overs our kind hosts endowed us with. I'm still so round and massive that I'm still using inertia as the main excuse for my sluggish pace at answering emails and reading posts and posting stuff. That, and the fact that I've been working on a side project of interviewing interesting folks around town... The latest being Dr. Gary McKercher of the San Diego Master Chorale (will post the interview separately here shortly) and Ian Campbell, the Impresario of San Diego Opera.

Thanks everyone for dropping by! I hope 2010 has started well for you and continuing to get better. For those in Europe and North America (or other cold places far north of the Equator, for that matter), I hope the weather gets much more manageable and comfortable your way soon! It would be wonderful if you could send me snow and I the warm sunshine in return... I know my fellow San Diegans will hate me for it, but I actually like winter to behave like Winter!