Happy Lunar New Year!

I normally do not take a day off for Lunar New Year but this year the wife had some ideas of doing some New Year visiting of the nearby relatives so I used a vacation day for the occasion.  Son still went to school although half of the kids at his bus stop did not show up.  Maybe in ten years Asians will have more political power and can have the Lunar New Year as a federal holiday.  I still recall reading one Andy Rooney rant about Veterans Day and Memorial Day.  Many people already mix the two, even though the former is for ex-soldiers who are still alive while the latter is for those who died.   Might as well combine those two holidays to make room for Lunar New Year.  Then us Asians and others can have the day off, kids off from school, etc.  Again, that will only happen when Asians become a more powerful political force.

We actually did not do much about the New Year until late in the day.  In the morning I did drive my mother to give gifts to the nurses and others at the health clinic she frequented throughout the year.  I had some time to refine the art of strategically placing text and such onto an origami Sonobe octahedron.  You may already know that I enjoy making Sonobe cubes, but the octahedron is a step up.  The cube is just that, six square sides, straight edges, sharp corners.  Whereas the cube uses six pieces of paper, the octahedron needs twelve.  I thought I got the design down pat the night before but this morning learned otherwise.  An hour or so in Photoshop, then printed out the 12 pages and folded them, and I finally have an octahedron that says "Happy New Year", as shown below.  The D-tag is included in the photo for size comparison.  A D-tag is usually attached to sneakers of runners to track their start and finish time.