use real butter

If things are looking a bit different, I’m in the process of some tidying up around here, which I hope is more or less transparent to everyone, but you never know… Besides, it’s the only tidying up I can do right now. As the Chinese New Year was nearing, Jeremy and I scrambled to clean the house because you aren’t supposed to clean once the new year arrives for fear of sweeping out the good luck. I’ve always read that you don’t clean for 2 weeks until the Lantern Festival (15 days later). Unlike my mom, cleaning isn’t one of my hobbies. Whenever she comes to visit us, within an hour of arriving, she will don a pair of rubber gloves and begin scrubbing my kitchen. I always tell her that I just cleaned the house and she always smiles and says, “Oh, I like to clean the house!” The first time this happened, Jeremy walked into our old apartment kitchen with eyes wide and blinking, “If your mom cleans our place before we vacate, we’d get every cent of our deposit back.” So when I mentioned to Mom over the phone that we just finished vacuuming and scrubbing since we aren’t supposed to clean for two weeks, she insisted, “No, just one day.” I told her everyone else says two weeks and she emphatically said, “It’s just the one day.” Okay, well I’m going to take that 2 weeks as a directive…