Sights! Sounds! Stunts!

Things to Love About Living in a Predominantly Chinese Neighborhood: during the Chinese New Year celebrations, there's a period of ritualized chasing away the evil spirits from local businesses. This involves two sets of mini-lion dancers (not the huge parade-style stuff, but small, two-person numbers - one guy running the lion head, the other the back end), a drum corps, and designated explosive experts to set off firecrackers (pretty much all teenagers). This whole crew works their way up and down the street, dashing in and out of the target establishment, brandishing the lions in some pretty impressive formations (including cheerleader-style standing-on-each-other's-shoulders towers to make themselves really tall), and setting off deafening rounds of crackers. This really livens up one's shopping.

The weather is effin' gorgeous today. Sunny, sunny blue, crisp, clear. And here's to hoping that it stays like this for herself_nyc's visit (coming up shortly!), since we've also been getting a fair amount of rain lately. Such as last night's torrential downpour. Toys and I were visiting over at MechMan's, and the wind hitting the building made me think we were having an earthquake a couple of times there. And there was even thunder, which is uncommon here for some reason. [ETA: And of course, no sooner do I post this than it starts clouding over. Now it's raining. Well, at least I got a small walk in first.]

I didn't catch Heroes last night, so I'm having to avert my eyes from nearly my entire friendslist until we'll have a chance to tape the Friday rerun and get caught up. (I gather it was like wow.) In compensation, though, at least I got to see the premiere of the new Power Rangers show Operation Overdrive, and can now happily report that the franchise is back to the fun level of quality enjoyed by Power Rangers SPD after the WTF painful weirdness that was Power Rangers Mystic Force. Funny, cute characters, some great movie-pastiche stuff in the first episode, and, just like SPD, mind-blowingly good stunts. Japanese athletes train for years in hopes of joining the guild that does stunts for these shows. It's like the Chinese opera stuff you can read about in Jackie Chan's bio.

I am so looking forward to the new Lynnevitational ficathon over at germaine_pet's place. Watch me bounce in anticipation of reading a whole pile of great new fic.