Night noises

It is the last day of February, in fact the last hour of February. I stayed up to take a warm bath and my last dose of pills for the day (apparently pertussis is what's been going around). As I walked through the house, shutting off lights, I was so pleased to hear the night noises drifting in through the open deck doors. Only February (!), and outside crickets, frogs, some unknown nocturnal birds with a whooping call, all sing to me through the screens, as tan geckoes skitter across. This has been a particularly cool winter (I will refrain from calling 50º cold), and a rainy one, but I'm not sure I'm ready for spring yet. Late winter days here are just about perfect, as are the nights.

Happy Chinese New Year, by the way. My camera isn't working, so I've got nothing to show you from our week off -- but then again, you can probably picture us staying home and laying low without any visual aids. The whole of the country goes visiting on New Year's, so we waiguoren tend to stay put. As it is Year of the Pig, we ate a lot of bacon and I made sausage. I'm not sure how the poor beasts came to symbolize good fortune, but we did enjoy our share of them. Do not, however, draw conclusions about how we rang in the Year of the Dog....