Guo Nian Hao

Happy Year of the Earth Pig!

I’ve been saying all along that I’ve been waiting for the Chinese New Year to get my head back in the game. I guess now’s the time to see if it works. :-)

As most people know, I have a bit of a fondness for fortunes and fortunetelling. A long time ago I used to read the Tarot cards, mostly for fun although one year when the hubby’s band was playing on Halloween I dressed as a gypsy and told fortunes between sets for drinks.

Unfortunately I didn’t keep it up and my skills are a little rusty now. I still, however, would like to design my own Tarot deck some day. I have written a series of articles on fortune telling, as well as a small book (that I printed a single copy of). And one year, for Christmas, I gave a few friends a bag of hand made runes with an instruction book to go with them. As I recall, the books were rather crudely bound as I had no idea what I was doing at the time. LOL

But back to the Chinese Zodiac.

For many years I labored under the mistaken impression I had been born under the year of the Pig. This is because I was following the Western version of the zodiac. The true version is based on the Chinese lunar cycle and their new year does not begin on January 1st, but on the second new moon after the winter solstice.

This means anyone born in January or early February might not be the sign they think they are. If you’re not sure, you can check the calculator HERE.

I’ve actually done a fair amount of research on the Chinese Zodiac, but do you think I can find any of it now? Of course not. One of the joys of not having your writing organized.

A few years ago, on my other blog, I did several series of non-fiction articles. I had fun doing them but eventually I ran out of topics (I think I was kind of scraping the bottom of the idea barrel when I did the series on cheeses of the world). But I’m left wondering what I should do with all that information.

Should I add a non-fiction page to my blog and provide links to the original articles? Maybe reprint them on this blog as a kind of non-fiction day? Print them out and put them in a binder? I mean let’s face it, I put a lot of work into those articles and it would be a shame to just let them go to waste. Maybe it would even inspire me to do something new.

You just never know.