Gung hei faat choi!

In honour of Chinese New Year on Saturday, my classmates cooked up a feast of spicy Indonesian noodles, steamed rice, deep-fried prawns and dumplings. We watched "The Curse of the Golden Flower." It's like Hamlet with subtitles - Yun-Fat Chow as king poisoning wife, his son in love with a half-sister, everybody dies in the end.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch the Why the Moon? symposium starts tomorrow - our glossy poster is up (no typos!) and the handouts are on the printer.
Our newly-elected Project Facilitators are buzzing about like bees (today's helpful directions "Should we have a handout?" "Who's meeting with the presenters?"), but everything is in hand. Our project, nicknamed Planetary Resources, even has a new website, thanks to monumental efforts in the last few days by Isra.

Spring is in the air and Russia and Star City are just a few weeks away... looks like I'll be bunking with an SSP05-er for the trip.

And in honour of "pancake Tuesday" and the start of Lent, I'm giving up gambling away my student funds in the vending machine.