Nothing brightens up a drab winter day like an unexpected riot of colorful roses delivered to your door (thanks, bro).

This morning was spent with a friend having coffee and pastries at Cafe Falai as we had our second meeting over decorating her new apartment. Did I mention that I’m being hired to design a living space? Yes, and not as easy as it seems. One design discipline doesn’t necessarily cross over to the other, but as we made our way through 2 stores, we’re honing in on a vision.

And finally! A low key day after a very weird and hectic week. We’re spending Valentine’s and President’s Day in the burbs with my parents and had a very much needed home cooked meal to celebrate the lunar new year.

And the Olympics? We’ve been watching and the girls are rather captivated with it. Mia especially is excited about the ice skating as it’s something that she has taken a recent interest to. The 1 hour TV rule has been thrown out the window for these 2 weeks and we’ve been turning it on and letting them stay up late to watch the events (but damn all those commercials). The Olympics were absolutely HUGE when I was a kid and into the 90s - Mary Lou Retton, Nadia Comaneci, the US Gymnastics team in Atlanta, ice skating, and if I think back hard enough, I can remember what a huge deal it was for the US hockey team to win at Lake Placid in 1980. They’re totally burned into my memory and the Olympic Summer Games was one of my favorites games to play on Atari. The graphics were so so crude even back then but we’d hum that anthem as we tried to pole vault our way to a medal.

So when did the Olympics lose a bit of its luster? When they decided to let pro athletes compete? When the Summer and Winter games staggered so that the Olympics were on every 2 years and not every 4? Whatever it is, it’s fun to share the excitement with the kids, who are learning that luge is dangerously fast, that mogul skiing is done on a bumpy course with tight, bent knees, that short track is popular in our family because of the Koreans and that a South Korean girl might be the first in the country to win a gold medal in figure skating. Good memories.

We’ve got some special little packages of Valentine’s Day treats for the Brooklyn Flea today. The “new-to-the-Flea” marshmallow hearts in 2 different flavors (cinnamon and rose/vanilla) are packaged with 3 hearts and our Pink Peppercorn Red Currant Linzers come packaged with 2 cookies. Perfect for picking up a little something sweet to add to that Valentine’s Day gift, yeah?

So in all this effort to get ready for Valentine’s Day for the business, we totally forgot about the kids. I think Mark is going to pick up some Kumquat cupcakes and Liddabit heart-shaped lollipops from our fellow fleasters today to surprise the kids with tomorrow. We’ll skip gifts to each other this year. I think we’ll both be glad when Valentine’s Day comes and passes.

For this year’s Valentine’s Day gift box we’ve brought back our Earl Grey Hearts, sprinkled generously with coarse pink sugar and introduced a variation of last year’s cookie: Pink Peppercorn Hearts (one of my favorites). There’s also 8 Creme de Cassis infused Chocolate Sandwich Cookies. All are cute and mini. In the shops here or here.

Coming up for the weekend, we’re back at the Flea, this time indoors in Brooklyn at the most grand and amazing Art Deco space you can imagine: the lobby of the former Williamsburg Savings Bank Tower. Check out the slideshow from last weekend’s opening. Foodies will be downstairs in the bank vault! We’ll be there this Sunday and every other weekend. Check this space for dates.

January is typically our R&D month since it’s a month where we can catch our breaths, but Valentine’s Day is just around the corner so we’re scrambling a bit. Stay tuned…

Oh, by the way, I changed some things around on the blog, but they are subtle changes that might go unnoticed which reminds me that as designers, we might fuss and fidget with details for hours and days and not have it mean anything to anyone but ourselves, lol.

One of my favorite sights this time of year has always been the holiday shop windows around the city. Saks, Bergdorfs, Macys, Bloomingdales, and Lord & Taylor all have fantastic displays, but I’m particularly keen on the windows of Bergdorfs, who doesn’t ever abandon their roots as a department store selling clothes and accessories (albeit a really fancy one housed in a former Vanderbilt mansion); they always manage to interweave visuals of fantasy and festivity with fashion. I thought this years windows were particularly wonderful and if it wasn’t 20 degrees out or if I didn’t have 2 squirming kids clutched to my legs - and at one point, laying on the sidewalk blocking pedestrian traffic - then I might have spent more time in front of these windows, especially the display that was made entirely of paper.

Which sort of brings me to my resolution this year (and normally I don’t really make any). GET OUT MORE. No, seriously, I tend to hibernate a lot because I’m usually busy working and also because going out carries along the temptation to spend money, however, I do believe that you need to be out in the world to get inspired. AND I need to do it before anxiety and worry sets in (I’m in another dry spell, freelance wise). These windows reminded me of what I loved doing most when I was a little girl - making dioramas. I LIVED for making them for school book reports, as well as for myself at home, and as terrible as this sounds, I was quite competitive at the age of 11 about these dioramas at school. I always had to make the most elaborate one. I loved working with paper, creating a 3-dimensional narrative world within the constraints of a little shoebox and getting completely caught up in the fantasy. I still don’t have any clear ideas on what I will do to attempt my gradual transition out of client work this year, but I am wishing to recapture that feeling I had when I was a kid making dioramas. Who knows, maybe I need to take a trip back to the windows, without the girls, to take a closer look. Maybe there is something in there.

It happens every year on New Years Day. My parents come over, sometimes bringing other members of family, and the minute they step inside the apartment a flurry of activity takes over. Shoes and coats are off, grocery bags are plopped down on the kitchen counter and pots of water get put on the stove to boil. This year my mom called me from the car to tell me to put the water on so that it would be in a boiling state when they got there. That’s planning! That’s wasting no time!

The threat of snowy icy weather made this year’s visit questionable and so when the weather looked clear in the morning, I breathed a sigh of relief from nearly missing the traditional rice cake soup that is supposed to bring good fortune for the new year. ‘Cause you know that if something bad were to ever happen this year the superstitious Asian in me would immediately think back to New Years Day when we didn’t have that soup. Now, however, I can blame it on something else.

This year my parents also brought over traditional clothing for the formal New Years bow to your elders ceremony, except we only had 1 dress from when the girls both dressed up for their 1 year banquet birthdays (it actually only fits Claudine now). Alright, if having 2 girls close in age ever taught me anything, it’s the fact that you can’t just bring 1 thing that both the girls might want. We learned this lesson when we were at a mall last Christmas and bought Mia fairy wings and figured that they’d both share it, but this ended up with Claudine in tears and a trip back to the store. Now there’s a big fat freaking “what the hell were you thinking only buying 1 child fairy wings while coming empty handed for the other?!?”.

As soon as my parents swarmed around Claudine and got her all dressed, Miss C marched to our room like a woman on a mission to admire herself in the mirror. Mia wasn’t too pleased that there was no fancy Korean dress up clothes for her which is why she’s missing in so many of these photos, but this ain’t nothing that a little Good Fortune money can’t fix. I joke, but when we were kids and my cousins and I were subjected to bowing down before all our elders - and I say subjected because it often turned into a laughfest for the adults to see how the kids butchered the bow which has to be performed a certain way depending on whether you were a girl or boy - we’d count our money to see how we made out. Sounds crude about the money, but we totally earned it. Btw, the girls did not have to bow down to us or my parents which was a bit odd to me as I thought they would start the tradition this year, but apparently my parents just wanted the photo op (tsk tsk, I’m on to you mom and dad).

We also made a reference to the other side of the family by playing Mark’s grandmother’s ukulele while the girls performed the hula. No, Mark is not Hawaiian, but his mom was raised there, so close enough. Besides, I think all of us wish we were Hawaiian, especially Mia.

And just as they came in, my family left in a blur of coats, bags and activity and that is how we spent our New Years. What about you? Any New Years traditions that you MUST do, lest you be afraid of being struck by lightning and bad fortune?

Really, there are no words for this other than the kids loved it of course. What we want to know is where do these people keep all this stuff the rest of the year and how much does it cost to light this up every evening for a month?

There are specific neighborhoods in NYC that are infamous for their crazy Christmas lights, usually anchored by one or 2 houses that are over the top. In Brooklyn there is Dyker Heights. In Queens, there is Bayside and that is where these photos were taken of 2 separate houses, a quick drive right after our sashimi extravaganza. It really was an evening of excess.

Christmas dinner at my parents’ house was a fairly typical meal, but on Saturday night our whole family went out for dinner at this unassuming Korean sashimi spot on 22102 Horace Harding Avenue in Queens called Samdado. We’ve been there before, but not in a while, and I’d forgotten just how much food you get when you order a sashimi dinner special to share. We’re talking numerous small dishes, plates and platters of food and just when you thought you were done and there was no more room on the table, the waiters and waitresses would come around with even more dishes of food to put down.

All this for a mere $120, the equivalent of which would get you a 2 or 3 tier fruits de mer plateau at Balthazar or Blue Ribbon. Sure, you don’t get the ambience of a Balthazar by a long shot, or maybe the artful presentation of an impressive silver tiered platter, but what you do get is more than enough food to feed the 5/6 of us (you know, Claudine had like a shrimp). I admit that there were times I’d walk away from a raw platter experience at one of those places after dropping mad money, feeling satisfied but still hungry. And they usually don’t serve raw lobster so fresh that the lobster was still moving a little (!!). Guys, it’s true, and I bet you are thoroughly unnerved right now at the thought of that, but it was an experience even if it was a little too “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman”. Mia was a bit freaked out by it even though she totally ate the raw lobster meat, but Claudine thought the whole thing was funny and would swat at the claws with her chopsticks (see the photo above for her reaction). The very same lobster ended up in a stew that was served at the end of the meal.

I’m always so impressed with Mia’s adventurous palate. That kid will try just about anything, even picking up some gnarly looking clam that none of us wanted to eat. She declared the sea urchin her favorite of the evening (mine too as it was particularly good that evening) and she also enjoyed the various Pa Jun (crisp pancakes), one of which was made from pumpkin.

And those photographs that line the wall around the restaurant? I was told that they are reproductions of images that were taken by an American soldier during the Korean War and discovered relatively recently. Pretty amazing that they are in color, given that this was the early 1950s. The shot of the woman carrying the baby, which we sat under that evening, is especially meaningful. My mother was carried by her grandmother strapped to her back when her family fled with the refugees, on foot, from Seoul to Busan to escape the Communists (some 200 miles). She still remembers this vividly. Her family was separated during the journey at some point. It’s amazing sitting here in that restaurant, given my parents’ history and experiences, that this is the same life. My dad returns to Korea every few years but my mom and I have only been back once since we immigrated to NY in the early 70s, and we were not together when we made our sole visits. We all talked about making plans to go as a family to Korea, with the kids, with my brother…some day.