Month: January 2025

Lunar New Year & Stuff (#382)

Gung hei fat choi!

For those unfamiliar, it’s New Year’s Day. At least in most of Asia. And since the western new year started off so badly, what with fires and the inauguration of nazis and shit, we’re gonna hope the Asian New Year starts a little better. (Maybe with a plan for actual resistance, Democratic Party?) At least this week we’ve had rain and clear air.

But back to Lunar New Year (which we use in SoCal because it’s more inclusive than “Chinese New Year”). Since my Chinese American husband didn’t grow up celebrating many holidays, I only recently learned that the traditional Cantonese New Year greeting  of “Gung hei fat choi” translates as “Hope you get rich.” I discovered this via Ronny Chieng’s hilarious stand up special, which I promptly showed to Andy. Andy laughed until he snorted and said, “Can confirm.”

The cultural emphasis on money is probably one of the reasons why my husband is so focused on saving money. He made coupons a huge part of my life. He spends hours making sure we have the best deals on the internet, cell phones, streaming services…and always get free new iPhones with them.

There are only two things Andy hoards: information and money. Everything else? Purge! He’s constantly trying to get rid of stuff in our garage. After our first two cats died, he tossed all their stuff. Then he threw out storage containers that had curtains from our last, bigger house.

Once we got Boss Cat, I had to buy new scratching posts, litterboxes, bowls, etc. When Andy moaned over the cost, I reminded him that it was his fault. And when Boss Cat promptly shredded some curtains and I discovered Andy had purged the old ones, I pointedly said, “Oh, too bad I have to buy more! They’ve gotten so much more expensive.”

I said that frequently.

After we lost our dogs Woofie and Fey to various cancers, Andy carefully boxed up their bowls, toys, leashes, and collars. He even sacrificed precious garage space for their bagged-up beds. Months later, we had all the amenities ready for our new dog Tankie. Tankie loved his beds and dog-proof soccer ball; Andy loved the lack of a canine cash outlay.

Our son Dalton, unfortunately, takes after both of us. He likes money AND stuff—especially stuffed animals. He refuses to donate any of them, despite being a teenager.

Some of the lesser stuffies relegated to the garage

Much to Andy’s dismay, the garage had to make room for a storage container of stuffies once Dalton started playing the tuba in middle school (the stuffie army AND the tuba could not all fit in the kid’s bedroom.)

Then Dalton got a surfboard. Andy quickly figured out how to secure it in the rafters of the garage.

Dalton recently spent his Christmas/lucky money from Andy’s mom on a snowboard.  This put Andy in a quandry: we will ultimately save money by not having to rent snowboarding equipment, but now there is more unpurgeable stuff in the garage.

Andy is currently eyeing Dalton’s tub of stuffies speculatively.

I’m not entirely certain that Dalton’s stuffed snake* is going to make it through the Year of the Snake.

And with the fascists in the White House?

I’m not exactly sanguine about the rest of us, either.

*Dalton also has a stuffed tarantula and Komodo dragon, though stuffed tigers dominate.

LA Is Not Okay (#381)

Los Angeles is never quiet. The county has about 10 million people. Less than half of them speak English at home. There are so many races and religions that not everyone sleeps in on the same holidays. We have 80 school districts, accommodating everything from Jewish High Holy Days to Asian Lunar New Year.

LA County was designed to include many mini-cities, connected by the Pacific Red Car. But since car and oil companies have spent over a century working against public transportation, we’re now mainly connected by freeways. The LA-centric Valentine’s Day card reads: “I love you so much I’d take the 134 to the 101 to the 405 to the 10 for you.* (*Excluding rush hour.)”

The immensity of Los Angeles is hard to explain to non-residents. Until you’ve spent 20 minutes descending over the lights before a night landing at LAX, you probably can’t fully comprehend that LA County is geographically larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined, and just a little smaller than Connecticut. It has more people than 40 states in the U.S.

Even during the early days of COVID, LA wasn’t quiet. In fact, I ran into more folks than usual when walking my dog early in the morning.

Which made last week eerie.

My windshield after turning on the wipers to get the ash off.

Los Angeles was quiet. There were mornings where Tankie and I saw no one as we walked through our neighborhood.

All we saw were red skies. Falling ash. And smoke.

And yes, of course I was wearing a KN95.

The air quality improved dramatically over the weekend in our area. Sunday morning I woke up to a “good” air quality rating, with minimal particulates.

The sun was shining, the sky was blue. From our hillside in southwestern Los Angeles county, I couldn’t see any smoke.

And yet it was still so, so quiet.

Because everything was canceled. And no, not in the way the MAGA meatheads scream about, which is actually consequences for celebrities being misogynistic, racist, or transphobic.

Local events were canceled. All youth sports were canceled. Grammy events were canceled. Premieres were canceled. The announcement of Oscar nominations was postponed.

Everyone stayed home—unless they were a first responder (including incarcerated firefighters, who you can support here), an animal rescuer, a reporter, or an asshole content creator flying drones into Quebec water bombers.

The screen of Watch Duty, which shows the fires and your location (blue dot)

We spent the week glued to the news, social media, and the literally life-saving new app called Watch Duty, sifting through an INSANE amount of disinformation lies as we tried to figure out what was happening.

And then figured out how we could help.

While also answering calls and texts from every single out-of-state friend and family member who couldn’t remember our address or use Google maps to discern how far away we were from the fires.

I have an enormous family. They are also a very smart family. And yet most of them still checked, individually, to make sure I was nowhere near the fires. It was an absolutely heart-warming pain in the ass.

As I explained to them, I am okay. Physically. Mentally, like every other Angeleno, I am a mess. I am one “Their dog survived the fire!” reel away from tears at all times. I am also one fucking MAGA misinformation meme about how the Black woman mayor of Los Angeles CITY (not the county) is somehow personally responsible for draining the reservoirs of all the surrounding cities from throwing my phone at any house flying a Trump flag.

I am constantly, easily distracted. I started this post 6 days ago. I lost the original draft because I hadn’t saved it when it was “Document 1” and my computer updated overnight. Since then, I’ve managed maybe a paragraph a day.

Like everyone else in SoCal, I deal with a lot of ash. While the air quality has improved, the dirt blown by the initial winds and subsequent fires’ ashfall will continue to cover our streets and sidewalks until it rains. If it rains.

Right now, it looks like even our normally rainy February might be dry.

Our hillside. A picture I took in January of 2023 on the left, January 2025 on the right. Can you tell we’ve had no measurable rainfall for months?

But thanks to fire crews and trucks from all over California, Oregon, and Utah, the Palisades and Eaton fires are gradually being contained. New fires have been put out. Help and support have come from all over the world.

Thanks for making me cry some more, all you kindhearted jerks.

Seriously, though, I appreciate all those who cared, worried, and donated. Which is pretty much everyone except Donald Dickhead Trump and the Californian Republicans who ditched their burning state to go kiss his ass at Mar-a-Lago.

Oh, and billionaire Elon Musk? Keep your incredibly generous donation of 3 rust-prone, rolling dumpsters cybertrucks—supposedly earmarked for one sheriff’s station that lost power.

Teamsters and locals are handling these issues much faster.

 

For those wanting to help, the best way is to donate to the organizations doing good work on the ground here: World Kitchen, the California Wildfire & Disaster Relief Fund, the Pasadena Humane Society, and the Sante D’ Oro Rescue Group.

Here are two of my favorite nonprofit groups that are rescuing and moving animals from LA to help our local shelters make more room: Best Friends, Dogwood Animal Rescue.

Other ways you can help? Stand up for legislators who stand up against fossil fuels.

Clap back against disinformation. 

And never stop caring.

Milton Leaves a Mark (#380)

Last year (i.e., last month) I blogged about having a live Christmas tree for the first time in a long time. He was a rental, and his name was Milton.

Milton was in a pot. He smelled amazing and looked lovely. We gave him a few quarts of water every 2-3 days to keep him from drying out. If a little water seeped out, it was caught by a large, circular plastic tray under the pot.

We didn’t have to worry about Milton tipping over (too heavy!) or the cat playing in the water under the tree.

We didn’t have to mess with a stand. Milton was delivered to our living room and picked up from our living room. Easy-peasy, I thought.

Until I was on the floor, cleaning up pine needles after Milton’s departure.

I flipped back the rug.

There was MOLD. Nasty dark green mold in a few places on the rug, but mostly on the wood floor.

I was too freaked out to get a picture of our mold, but here’s a photo that looks similar from a Reddit thread on moldy floors.

How could this be?!

Milton’s tray didn’t leak. I was always checking to make sure the floor and rug were dry.

I did some internet sleuthing and discovered that the lack of air circulation between the heavy pot, the plastic tray, the rug, and the floor most likely created a fantastic mold biome on our old hardwood floors. (This is one reason why couches and beds are built on legs—to allow ventilation and avoid mold. Also one of the reasons why Germans are notorious for throwing open their windows in the winter.)

I’m not sure why this didn’t happen with previous potted trees in the exact same spot. Maybe the trees were smaller. Maybe the humidity was higher this year (we had many foggy days in the second half of December). Maybe it’s because we had to remove the backing from our living room rug when we had it cleaned years ago. Maybe the seal on the wood flooring eroded over the last decade.

Probably it’s a bit of all those things.

We tried to remove the mold multiple recommended ways: cleaners, bleach, vinegar, a peroxide paste with baking soda and Dawn. The paste worked on the rug, but the mold had gotten into the grain of some of the wood (original flooring from 1954 that had been refinished several times). There was nothing for it but to sand.

Handy Andy got out his mask, his sander, his little shop vac, and went to work. After sanding, Andy used polyurethane to seal the wood. We turned up the heat to decrease the humidity and speed up drying time. Once the polyurethane had cured, Andy lightly roughed up the area with sandpaper again and applied another coat of polyurethane.

Three coats and three days later, the floor looked like this:

Some areas look a little bit lighter, but it’s mostly under the rug.

The hardest part was probably keeping the animals away while the polyurethane dried. Tankie, especially, was determined to huff polyurethane at every opportunity. He had to be outside or locked in a bedroom for several hours each day.

Gate we used to try and keep Tankie’s nose off the polyurethane

I check the floor and rug daily. It’s been almost a week, and no sign of the mold reappearing.

But I’m sure I’ll look again. Daily. Obsessively. For the next year.

I thought my frugal husband would use Milton and the mold as ammunition to not spend money on a Christmas tree next year. Instead, he’s merely planning a modified dolly for our next tree.