Chinese New Year Food Over the Weekend

Chinese New Year fell on Friday the 12th. Our ESL class at church has usually celebrated it with a pot luck supper on the Friday or Saturday night of that weekend. Most of our students are Chinese and they respond gladly to the invitation to show up at the Church kitchen in the afternoon to make 100s and 100s of dumplings. That is the main course and main attraction.

Those of us who are "Helpers" (usually paired with one or two of our ESL students) are treated royally and if we insist... we are allowed to bring a dessert, but generally we are honoured and treated as special guests. They insist we go first along the long groaning tables with lots of food, but there are especially mega-large trays heaped up with freshly made dumplings!

With all the COVID restrictions, I expected that the greetings and best wishes we expressed to each other the Sunday before at our online ESL class (on Feb. 7th) would be the extent of our celebrations this year.

Not quite so. In the background some organizing was done so that some of the Chinese students who knew how to make the dumplings had made large batches at home. Those who didn't had been paired off with someone who did.

Thursday evening Hongru (one of the leaders) phoned to say her husband was coming by with some dumplings for me, and also some sweet rice balls - if I was not allergic to peanuts, as that is the filling. No, I LOVE Peanut butter! In minutes Watter was at the door handing me a bag of these goodies.

(I learned this last Sunday night at our Zoom ESL class, that they had delivered some of the dumplings and rice balls to each and every one of the 15-20 Helpers at their front doors! Even one of them who lives on an acreage outside of the city!)

So I had about half a dozen of each on Friday for my lunch. When Gary showed up on Saturday I boiled up another batch for us to have for lunch. I gave him 6 of each and also for myself, and I provided some fried rice on the side to make a complete meal.

I'd found a recipe on Youtube that I wanted to try out, so I had that on Sunday. There was enough of that hamburger/cheese casserole done in the frying pan for two meals.

Yesterday, I really did expect Gary to show up by supper. So I prepared another meal with the dumplings and the sweet rice balls. Plus a noodle soup. He showed up about 9 pm. but when he said that he had just snacked throughout the day, I warmed up the portions I had set aside for him and he got a late supper.

I now have just 5-6 dumplings left. But they are in the freezer, so I'm going to spread out the New Year's celebration to yet another day.

How to Share Documents as PDFs or e-Books

Have you ever had someone send you a document, only to find that the font and the arrangement of the text on the pages was all off- and ugly?

Maybe that has scared you off from sending such files to others, even though you think you have something valuable to read, or some nice illustrations you have managed to create.

I used to moan, (back in my early online years in Hague) because I couldn't send things to another person's computer so it would like as nice as I what I had just created. I knew there was software that would create PDF files, which always look the same no matter on which computer they are opened, but that software cost over $200 back then.

Well, good news! PDFs can now be created totally for free in our word processing programs. It doesn't matter which word processor is on your computer. Even Microsoft Word, or LibreOffice (which is free to download and install), and many others have this feature built in. Just check the row of icons on the top of the screen when you have that program open. As your pass your cursor slowly over them, their names show up. When one says, "Export Directly as PDF" or words to that effect, you have found it.

So now you can create your document, arranging the text as you would for a book or whatever you want it to be, even to inserting images where you want them. Then save the file as a working document, but then also click that icon and export it with the same name, but with the extension after the dot (.) .PDF or .pdf

Now you can freely attach that file to an email to mail to someone else. They will not be able to edit it, but they will see exactly what you were looking at when you created it.