3-Feb-2000 Year of the Dragon
So here I go backdating an entry. The real reason is that I hadn't gotten around to making new graphics. Truth is, I had the picture, just not a GIF for a background. It's really a week later, more than a third of the way through the month, without an entry.
On the date of which I write, the company I work for had a big party in the Park Plaza hotel in Boston. The story I've heard is that the company was going to have a big party to celebrate going public last May, but didn't go public, so didn't have a big party to celebrate nothing; but had given the hotel a big, nonrefundable deposit. In order not to have the deposit go to waste, they had a party to celebrate the Year of the Dragon.
There was food of all sorts: a nachos bar with melted cheese, sour cream, guacamole, sliced jalapenos (I'll tell you in a minute why I didn't look up the HTML code for n-tilde); a roast beef and turkey, carved while you waited; stir-fried chicken and vegetables, being stir-fried on the spot; and some things I've forgotten. Of course elegant desserts, also.
Everyone dressed up for the occasion. It was pretty shocking to see people who customarily come to work in T-shirts and jeans (e.g. me) wearing suits and ties. I was wearing a chalkstripe gray flannel suit that I got for Charley's bar mitzvah, let's see, must have been 1984, and have probably worn 5 or 6 times since.
This was one of those parties with party favors. As you came in you could take a little box wrapped in red paper that turned out to contain an elegant brass paperweight in the shape of a fortune cookie. Towards the end of the evening the president of the company announced that we were keeping with the Chinese tradition of giving people a red envelope with a small amount of money. We were hoping for Sacajawea dollars, but the envelopes turned out to contain Susie B's.
The high point of the evening was a troupe of Dragon dancers who paraded up the stairs and through the ballroom, drums pounding and cymbals ringing. A great time was had by all.
Oh, right, the missing n-tilde. I'm processing some Japanese text on my computer at work, so I have a little toolbar running to change character sets. The Asian characters are two bytes each, and the first byte of each pair is up in the range of characters with diacritical marks. When I have my display set to show the Asian characters, I can be reading a journal and all of a sudden see one Chinese character in the middle of the text. It's because the author put in an a-umlaut or n-tilde where it belongs, but my computer is acting as though it's in another hemisphere. So anyway, my excuse is that it's not laziness, it's just that I don't want to confuse myself if I happen to read my own page at work.
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