And Then At The Chinese New Year Event

The mall hosted a Chinese New Year event this weekend, much as it does every Chinese New Year that I’ve been tracking. They had some lucky-draw giveaways. Last year my love and I came achingly close to winning something. We had a block of maybe six tickets and they called the number before our block. The number after our block. The numbers ten less and ten more than ones in our block. This guy next to us was amazed by our near luck. He didn’t win either.

We didn’t get so close to winning anything this year. But that’s all right because the raffle prizes seemed to be from a restaurant’s surplus sale. Some of the prize items were slow cookers. One, a mystery item in a huge box, was three slow cookers. Not just a tower of three slow cookers, but a huge box that contained three slow cookers together. You know, for people who realize they need to buy three of them at once and want a huge, unwieldy package instead of an unwieldy pile of packages.

Besides giving away hundreds if not thousands of slow cookers, they were giving away deep fryers. Lots of deep fryers. And I realized, a deep fryer is almost the precise opposite of a slow cooker. This must be why the pile of slow cookers and the pile of deep fryers were on opposite sides of the stage. You wouldn’t want the appliances to start fighting.

There were some non-cooking-appliance things given away. Please picture this scene: a kid maybe half the age of our pet rabbit finds out she has a winning ticket. She runs on stage. She picks one of the wrapped-up mystery gifts. Inside is what every kid most hopes to win: a heating pad. The kid had the same expression you see from a dog who was expecting a burnt sausage and instead got asked a calculus question. So this was all worth it, as we got to live-roleplay Jim’s Journal.