There's a lion sleeping in my trunk!

What!? You can't tell that it's a lion?! It's obvious...it's a lion on a pedestal, lying on its side, in my trunk. This is one of those Chinese ceramic garbage cans that are so ubiquitous in mainland China. Obviously designed by artists and not engineers -- although the lion has a big gaping mouth for a receptacle, that little hole on the bottom of the pedestal is how you would have to get the garbage out!

So we were at the China Council's annual Chinese New Year fundraiser auction, and as always I buy something totally inappropriate and useless. Last year, I bought the Peking Opera Monkey King suit, and this year, it's a giant garbage can! Of course I pass up all the gorgeous silk and wool rugs...just another thing to vacuum. I did buy a set of very cool stamps with a design from the Dunhuang caves and a book about China and Iran. And a very cute Chinese ink brush painting by a 9 year old.

I did work on Calypso today. Here are all the sheets laid out in order, waited to be folded and glued into the text block. Hopefully, tomorrow by this time, these stacks will be shorter, or maybe gone, and the stack of text blocks will be a lot bigger.