President's Day Weekend 2007 and Happy Chinese New Year

Kind of a quiet holiday weekend and I spent the day off catching up on my sleep. Work has been pretty busy this last week so it was nice to just relax, read in bed, and snooze. We did a little shopping yesterday at IKEA and spent the evening constructing 4 dining chairs and one loungey type chair for the sun room. The IKEA directions could be a little more efficient (and I know something about directions). On more than one occasion we realized we had made a mistake because the appropriate screws or chair pieces we not correctly marked. The good part was we did this all while watching the season premiere of the Amazing Race All Star show. Yes, I am hopelessly addicted to TV and now becoming more and more addicted to reality TV. But the Amazing Race is all about travel and it is so fun to see all the places around the world that they end up going on their crazy adventure. The wacky relationships and the bickering is fun too. Before we hunkered down in front of the TV we spent the afternoon at a Chinese New Year festival. It was the fairly standard Chinese New Year festivity; lion dancing, fireworks and food. We spent SAturday cleaning the house; sweeping and taking out the garbage because it is good luck to start the Chinese New Year with a clean house (what mom started that tradition;)?) and sweeping, cutting, and throwing out trash is forbidden on the new year day.
I did take advantage of my extra holiday time and went to the shelter today as well as my usual shift on Saturday. Lately, I have been getting some really mouthy puppies who like to go for my whole hand when I play ball with them. I look like I did when I was a kid with scratches on my hand from my very energetic border collie puppy. Every time they get rough I stop the play and we go back to the kennel but it has been 4 dogs in the last 2 weeks to do this. Hopefully, with more training they will get a little less mouthy. My favorite moment with the dogs was when the Schnauzer named Fancy I took out chased after the shadow of a bird flying over head. He was very disappointed when there was no bird on the ground.
Well I have to run and make hamburgers- it's like 75 here and we thought we'd celebrate with an outdoorsy kind of dinner. Hope all you have a great year of the Pig.