The old grey mare...

So, for no particular reason I've decided to take up my keyboard and post on my dusty blog. Because of this complete lack of any kind of reason I'm also focusing this blog entry on things my mother would be most interested in.

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Chief among these right now is, of course, her grandson, Lucas (or, as I like to call him, the Grand Overlord of All He Surveys at Least in His Own Mind – GOAHSLHOM for short). We're closing in on his second birthday and he is in full-tilt "Terrible Twos" mode. Now to be fair he's better-behaved than other two year olds I've encountered. He is, however, incredibly active and hard to manage for a variety of reasons:

• he is hypercurious about everything (the more dangerous or annoying the better);
• he is much larger than other children his age;
• he is commensurately strong.

When he wants something it takes the concerted effort of Joan and her mother together to rein him in (or just me since I'm still the giant in the family).

He is, in a word, annoying.

The annoyance is mitigated, however by the sheer joy of watching him develop (and, in my case, the sheer joy of warping his mind for my own amusement). The initial health scare is gone. Lucas is a big, healthy, active, normal child in every sense. He's developing manual skills (some of them annoying – my desk drawers are no longer sacrosanct). He's developing very good listening comprehension skills in both English and Chinese. (We often underestimate how much he understands now!) His spoken skills are pretty good; he can communicate most things quite clearly now (and boy does he like to communicate them constantly!). He can recognize about 75% of the alphabet without error and about half of the remainder with about 50% accuracy. (He still confuses "N", "M" and "W" mind.) He's memorized a couple of Tang Dynasty poems (remember those from your childhood, Mom?) and is even at the point of beginning to recognize some Chinese characters in context (but not independently yet).

Some of the interesting character traits he's developing:

• he's absolutely obsessed with cars and has been from an amazingly young age;
• he loves Dora the Explorer (the TV show and the books);
• he's recently developed a love of the ridiculous rhymes of Dr. Seuss (There's a Wocket in my Pocket! being his current favourite book edging out by a hair the illustrated version of The Itsy Bitsy Spider);
• he likes to play hide and seek and is both remorseless and tireless while playing it;
• when he's tired he doesn't get whiny and cry, he gets crazy and runs around like a manic idiot;
• he's an extremely picky eater (obviously acquired from Joan, not me!);
• he likes music and will dance to it all the time, sometimes even managing to look cute instead of spastic;
• his first favourite song was, of all things, "Iron Man" which has given me one of my favourite images of all times: an elderly Chinese lady humming "Iron Man" to a young baby to soothe him;
• a current favourite song is the theme song to the old television show Night Court although I recently introduced him (by accident) to "Squeeze Box" which he also enjoys.
  

I do have a lot of new pictures of him and will post them as soon as possible, but some technical problems are interfering with this at the moment. When those are cleared, I'll make a new blog entry that consists almost entirely of Lucas photos.

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The next person that Mom's going to be interested about is, of course, Joan. Joan is doing well, but this term bit off (quite a) bit more than she could chew work-wise and is worn to a frazzle. I, of course, told her this was a mistake long before she started into teaching 30 periods per week—over and above the whole parenting thing, mind—but nobody ever listens to me until it's too late. Still, this term is ending soon and next term she won't be making this same mistake. He won't come out and admit that I was right, but we both know that I was.

Joan is still the chief driving force behind us wanting to buy an apartment in Wuhan. This is proving more difficult than we had anticipated because the Chinese mortgage industry, like most large-scale operations in China, is run by untrained chimpanzees with bladder control problems. (They don't know what they're doing, are unsuited to their positions and like to piss on everything around them.) The size of the down payment we need to make is just too large to be realistic so I'm going to have to go hunting for a better-paid job or start a successful business or something. (Alternatively I could win the lottery or something. It's hard to do when you don't buy tickets, however.) We're still working at it though, even through the added expense of a personified force of destruction (a.k.a. 王森锐 or Lucas) in the household. Indeed it is for Lucas (giving him a stable home in his childhood) that we're going through this. It'd just be nice to get it done earlier.

Other things Joan-related: she's on her way to getting her Master's degree in teaching, get this, Chinese as a Foreign Language. This is our entry plan for Canada. Given the giant China has become on the world stage there's a lot of places itching to have their staff trained in Chinese. Further a lot of overseas Chinese are interested in having their children learn their "mother" tongue. This is beside the obvious possibility of government interest in native Chinese speakers. There's lots of opportunity for the future in this and Joan's working hard at it.

(Anybody want to learn Chinese from Joan so she can get some praxis?)

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This leads to me, the last person my mother is interested in hearing about in our little family over here in China. My family life is going fine, although two sudden adjustments (bachelor-to-husband, husband-to-father) in rapid succession after 40 years of solitude was a bit of a shock (to put it mildly). As you may have gathered from the above, I'm insanely fond (and proud!) of my son despite the annoyances and worse of parenthood. (Oh, Mom? I apologize unreservedly.) Pretty much anything I do these days is for him, short- or long-term.

My work life is far improved at my new school, the Hubei Communication Technical College. This is not what one would call a high-rung college (more third-string) and as such they lack the arrogance of my previous school which (fraudulently) banks in on the good name of one of the more respected universities in China (Wuhan University). They, as a result, pay me (slightly) better, give me a much nicer (albeit about 10% smaller) apartment and pay all my bills except long distance telephone. That's not the best part, however. The best part is that I'm not just a 白猴子 ("white monkey") to them. I'm a teacher. I'm treated as a teacher and an asset. My opinion is sought out on matters that affect me (and sometimes even on matters that don't affect me). I'm invited to planning meetings. I'm actually encouraged to interact with the Chinese staff! (Three dinners so far and still counting, and this after I had to demure from two because of scheduling conflicts.)

The down side, of course, is my students. Just like the East Lake Campus students of my last school, these students are the dregs of China's educational system. They're entirely unsuited to being in university-level (or even college-level!) education. Unlike my former East Lake students, however, I actually feel for these kids. They're not arrogant, spoiled rich brats on the whole. (There's one exception out of about 100 students.) They're decent human beings who are being forced into something they have no interest in nor aptitude for. (The same is true of my former East Lake students, but I loathed them as human beings so didn't care about their suffering.)

On the other hand, my main campus students at my old school were decent people and, in many cases, people I actively thought had a real future (with several of them proving my predictions correct now!). I have no such students here. Still I'm overall much happier with my work here than I was at the old place so the move was a net plus.

My mother was kind enough to send me a big batch of books for my technical use (she's already sent Lucas about 20...). Because of her I'm now learning how to use ANTLR, Groovy, Scala, Erlang and Haskell (with Clojure on the way in another package) so that I can get my technical skills back up to snuff and ready for a move to high tech. Further, I have prospects, high tech-wise, here in China. One of my former students has talked to his manager about me and that manager is interested. Should things go well, I may be out of teaching next year this time and back into software, this time working for a Chinese company with ... well, I won't give away what it is that they were interested in me for so that I don't jinx the process of being hired. If this happens, though, it will be big. Very big.

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That's it for this blog for now. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things again (I have a strategy I like to call "mini-blogging" that may help) and not have a three-month gap again. And Mom, for no particular reason I promise that the pictures of Lucas will be up in a blog posting just for you before the week is out.

Was that ever a long week...!

OK, so I said a week and it's almost a month. Sue me. I dare you.

That being said, I do apologize to my blog's biggest (only?) fan for the delay. Life just gets very, very busy and crazy at the beginning of term in a new school and I'd forgotten that aspect of things. Distractions piled on distractions piled on Lucas ... I mean distractions ... and before I knew it, a month had passed. Then I promised to have this thing up by Sunday and a network problem prevented it. (I couldn't access Blogger nor Picasaweb.) So here I am, late Monday morning, filling the blog with my usual drivel.

This is going to be a picture-intensive blog entry, and there's more pictures than are showing up here to be found at Lucas' very own Picasaweb album. Pop on over for more details.

Lucas is growing up very quickly now, and I mean this in all respects. He's smarter. (Too damned smart, sometimes, if in a stupid sort of way!) He's taller. He's more active. He's everything that drives Joan mad.

Joan, you see, has one flaw among her many virtues: she really does not adapt well to change. Lucas is in that stage of his life ("Terrible Twos" are coming!) when change is the only constant. Just as Joan gets used to one set of behaviour patterns from him (nap times, for example, or meal times) he goes and changes things and this drives her (and her mother) nuts. Me, I've had nothing but change for all my life except for an 8.5 year period of illusionary stability (Edmonton). I've learned to adapt to change a thousand times over since then. Joan ... not so much.

I guess some statistics are in order. We have a height chart on the wall and officially measured him on August 17. 87cm. At a little over one year and seven months old, Lucas was as tall as many 3-year olds in China. And he's still sprouting. A few days ago—around the 17th, oddly enough—I did a quick eyeball check (didn't have a book handy so no official measurement) and he'd jumped to 88.5 already, maybe even 89. Oddly enough his weight is not increasing as quickly. He's shooting up, but he's losing fat in the process. This kid is going to be slim and wiry when he grows up. (At the rate he's wearing out his mother's and grandmother's last nerve, if he grows up!)

His personality is also developing at a rapid pace. I don't know what Joan and I did in our past lives to deserve this, but Joan (an introvert) and I (an even stronger introvert) have been saddled with a boy who's the precise opposite: an extrovert of the highest order. He loves having people around. He loves interacting with people. He can't stand periods of quiet and rest. This, too, causes him to wear out nerves quickly. Of course he's so damned cute when being aggravating that he likely will survive to adulthood.

There are a couple of interesting personality traits developing. He's got my stubbornness for sure. Once he sets his mind on something he doesn't let it go until ... well, as with any near-two-year old he's got the attention span of a gnat combined with, say, another gnat. But while we're in that attention span phase, he's dogged. Whatever he wants he wants and he simple will not be distracted from it. Until the attention span thing, I mean.

He's developed an obsession with cars already. He loves them. He points to toy cars, photos of cars, cars in movies, cars on the street and starts reciting what kind they are. He's even right most of the time. His favourite toys are cars (or Lego-like bricks which I make into cars or car accessories). He'll always drag out his picture book and flip it to the cars page to recite the names. Out in the street he'll constantly look out for cars and let out a joyful "che che!" ("car-car!") when he sees one, then announce what kind it is. (He even distinguishes between "car" and "taxi".) It's getting to the stage that we want to rename him to "Lucas Cars" or something like that because he just won't shut up about them!

The other thing that's developed is his penchant for motion. This kid is never not moving. Look at the pictures I put up of him. Even on the best there's tell-tale motion blur. Keep in mind that I put up one photo for about every ten I take. The rest? The rejects? Pure blurs. He doesn't sit still long enough to photograph well. (It doesn't help that he's fascinated by the camera so when he's aware of it he'll lunge straight for it. This is why there's so many photos of him pointing at the camera and grinning.)

I'd like to close off this blog entry with a gallery of photos with attached commentary.

You better not be trying to steal my bun, Mister!

This is that blurring thing I was talking about earlier.

Maybe if I close my eyes and wish really hard, I can get another car!

A rare moment of stillness. He can't see the camera either.

One of his favourite toys, accessory courtesy of yours truly.

The three toys in sharp focus, Lucas in the back being fed.

Same scene, different focus.

Beware the Joaninator

Yeah, I said I'd do this yesterday, Mom, but life happened and as it is I can't even do the mega-update I was planning. Here's a brief summary of my current status for those just sitting on the edge of their seats. I'll be posting details on each of these later as I get time alone.

• The move was a success, although I threw my back in the process and was in agony for a couple of weeks afterwards. (I need some medication now. I'm fresh out.)
• The new apartment, although smaller, is far more intelligently laid out and outfitted so it's actually much more comfortable than the older, larger place. And it has a seated toilet. I can read again finally!
• Lucas adapted almost instantly to the new environment and is entering his "terrible twos". Wilful but cute, so that makes up for it.
• I've been doing a little bit of daily teaching every day for a bit of spending money.
• We're actively looking for our own apartment now.

Each of those items will get expanded upon within the next week (knock on Lucas' head).

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Now to explain the title.

There was one little incident in the move that was a bit negative. (I mean aside from shoving a shard of glass from a broken ink bottle deep into my thumb while unpacking.) The incident was unpleasant, but I emerged from it with a newfound respect for the toughness of my wife.

The complex we lived in was a "secure" complex with on-site, live-in security and all that jazz. All of this is run by the building manager, Mr. Peng. Mr. Peng is an irritating tick of a man; the kind of guy that shakes your hand and leaves you feeling mysteriously oily. Having him in charge of security is kind of like having the RCMP investigate its own officers' misconduct: futile and a recipe for disaster.

One thing, for example, that Mr. Peng does is he rents out empty apartments in the complex off the books to his friends. He also treats the security guards like dirt and is suspected of entering tenant apartments when they are not present (he's never been directly caught at this but there's lots of circumstantial evidence).

After moving, Joan and I went back to the apartment to clean it. We decided that the school treated us decently so we're going to be decent and clean up the place for them. This was a huge job that was shaping up to be a multi-day thing. (Marion, your "Magic Erasers" were utterly defeated by the kitchen. I was shocked.) During our time there, Joan had her scooter plugged in to charge up. When she left to pick up lunch, she didn't want to carry the charger all the way up to the fifth floor only to carry it all the way back down again when she got back. Instead she put it in the (secured) stairwell under the stairs.

When she came back it was gone.

She knew right away that Mr. Peng had taken it. Why? Because he'd tried it earlier and was caught in the act. At the time he pretended he was looking for the owner of the charger, but in reality he was walking away from the place he found it and doing so rather furtively. So when it went missing for real, he was the first (and only) suspect.

Joan worked herself up into a real fury over this. (Mental note: never steal anything from Joan. Ever. For any reason.) She was angrier than I've ever seen her before. And in the process we cooked up a scheme to get the thing back.

Joan wrote a note saying, basically, "my husband saw who took it; we won't say anything if it's returned to us within an hour". She posted this note on the building manager's door. This led to Mr. Peng's first error. He came to confront us about the "outrageous accusation". He challenged me to my face to say that I'd seen him do it. I hadn't, but he didn't know this. There are lots of places he could have been seen from and he knew it. Without any friendly gesture and without anything he could hang any hopes upon I nodded certainly. Yes, I'd seen him walk away with it.

This was the gamble. Had he stuck to his guns he'd have left room for doubt and it would have been a "he said; she said" scenario with no resolution. He was, however, shaken by the absolute positive he'd got from me there. Suddenly he wasn't so sure he'd gotten away with it.

First he tried the "I'll help you find out who took it" route. This was mistake #1. He went out and acted all concerned, asking any of the tenants outdoors if they'd seen anybody who didn't belong entering or exiting the complex. A woman who'd been outside with her son for a long time and who'd been near where anybody entering or leaving would have to have passed said "no, no strangers entered or left". This eliminated an outsider. The rest of the tenants in the building were not on the list because a) they were mostly gone and b) we're talking about people who are making a MINIMUM of a hundred grand a year.

Next, shaken by me saying I saw him walking away with the thing in his hands, he went to his apartment to show me the thing I must have seen: a plastic bowl of sorta-kinda the same colour. This was mistake #2. In doing this he placed himself at the scene of the crime at the time it happened. When he showed us the bowl, I just flatly laughed at him, explaining that I can tell the difference between a small, rectangular light cyan object and a large, round dark cyan object at only 5 stories. (Hell, I could probably spot the difference a block away!)

Now is when the Joaninator sprang into action. She gave the man a tongue-lashing I've never seen her give anybody before. (Hopefully I never see it again.) In the process Mrs. Peng joined the conversation and it turned into a three-way shouting match. A shouting match Joan won.

In the end she won the cruelest (and most appropriate) way I can even imagine. She threatened, in short, to expose Mr. Peng's sideline rental service. You know, not only threaten his livelihood, but to basically say "give this thing back or you're going to jail for something else I know about you".

For face reasons, of course, Mr. Peng couldn't admit he stole the thing. Instead he offered to pay for the missing charger "because we're such good friends". Joan phoned the dealer, got the price on the recharger and took the money. Then we left. And we didn't bother doing the deep cleaning we planned on because, frankly, we lost interest in being nice to the people running the building. Let them hire a cleaner now.

A little coda that was entertaining. The recharger cost 100RMB. When Joan went to get it, she told the story to the shop attendant who laughed and said it's too bad this wasn't known beforehand. The recharger, you see, was on special for 100RMB. Usually it was 150RMB and the shop staff all agreed that a thief should have been forced to pay the higher price.

A small story to tide the gap.

I know, I know. More than a month. Trust me, I've been really busy and now am in the middle of moving. I'll have a post with lots of cute pictures of Lucas and stuff, but for now I'll just relate an early story of my stay in China.

Now I have to explain about my first school. It was a crappy little community college-like affair whose leadership had Grand Ambitions. (I have to capitalize it to get the scope of it across.) To accomplish its aims it had to do a lot of renovation and upgrading. One of the most visible upgrades was an actually-quite-impressive sports field.

It was a very modern sports field, all things considered, replacing a dusty clay track with a modern spongey-rubbery sort of deal, for example. The bleachers were being completely replaced (albeit with the ubiquitous concrete-covering-bricks construction that plagues most of China's buildings). While this was going on, there was landscaping being done all across the campus as well.

It is the landscaping to which I will be turning my attention because, one day, while teaching classes, I happened to look outside my classroom window. What I saw left me baffled. Two workmen were working fastidiously in the blazing afternoon sun alongside the sports field fence.

One man, apparently the foreman, was digging what looked like over-sized post holes. He'd dig one of these holes, proceed 3m down the fence, dig another hole, proceed 3m and so on. The second man was two holes (6m) behind him, very carefully and thoroughly filling in the holes. It went on like that with mechanical precision. One man digging an over-sized post hole. An empty post hole being left in the sun. One man filling in a post hole.

I was, of course, very curious. I was new to China and I knew the Chinese had different ways of doing things. I simply couldn't fathom what the pair were doing. Was this some bizarre way to aerate soil? Or was it a way to take the hard clay and loosen it up to aid in irrigation? I set out after class, student in tow, to find out.

The workmen were just countryside enough to be positively thrilled that a foreign teacher was expressing interest in their work. They showed me their equipment, talked about the weather and such (through translation, of course) and finally I got to the point.

"Why is it that you're doing this here? You dig a hole, and he fills it in two holes behind you?"

The answer was very enlightening in a Chan (Zen) sort of way.

"Oh, our work group usually has three people," the foreman explained. "But today the tree planter is in the hospital, sick."

Saturday night's alright for sweating...

Apologies to Elton John for misappropriating his lyrics there, but damn is it hot today.

It's Saturday night. I've spent a day teaching my adult students (without breakfast this morning to boot). I went shopping for some necessities (Lucas got his first taste of Lego-like blocks!). Now I'm sitting in my apartment at almost 11PM drenched to the core because it's 32°C (75% humidity – humidex calculation says it feels like 47°C!) and my apartment is being "cooled" by a single room-sized air conditioner off in the corner of a single bedroom.

Welcome to summer in Wuhan, one of the "Three Hells Furnaces" of China. (The other two are Nanjing and Chongqing.)

And it isn't even July yet!

Junior Problem Solver

(This is another Lucas story. Sorry.)

Short story, but true. Lucas and I are playing with the toy vehicles he's obsessed with. I get a little toy plane wound up and aim at at Lucas. He steps aside and lets it sail under the bed. Far under the bed.

I asked Joan to get the laundry stick (a thing used to get stuff on and off the high points where we hang laundry) but she was too busy to get it. I didn't want to try both keeping track of a hyperactive toddler while going out to the balcony to find the stick, so I just told Lucas "sorry, I can't get it".

Lucas, pauses, staring at me. He then trundles off to the corner of the room where we have a long-forgotten old mop handle leaning for obscure historical reasons. This mop handle is something nobody's even glanced at for over a year. Lucas, however, not only spotted it but figured out how it could be used to get his precious aeroplane. He stands pointing at it making eager sounds and sure enough, I go get it and retrieve the plane.

That's already pretty impressive in its own right. This gets better, though. My son has a mischievous streak in him and as soon as the handle was put back he took his plane and threw it under the bed. He misjudged the distance, though, and I was able to snag the plane without the stick. So he threw it again, much more successfully. He glances up at me with twinkling eyes full of mischief, laughing at my expression.

Of course I'm not a nice person so I had Joan take him from the room for a short time. In that time I rescued the plane and hid the pole. When Lucas came trundling back he made a beeline for the plane and, as expected, laughed as he threw it under the bed. Then, when I didn't immediately go pick up the stick to rescue it, he trundled off to where the mop handle used to be and, without looking, pointed at it making urgent sounds. I affected confusion. He looked. The most crestfallen face I've ever seen him put on without crying materialized. He was utterly baffled, actually touching the wall to make sure the thing was actually gone.

Merriment ensued.

Busy week

Well, anybody afraid that this is going to be another Lucas blog entry can rest assured that I will only be mentioning him once. Since that mention was in the previous sentence, you know the rest of the blog won't be quite as tedious as it usually is.

In September of 2006 Joan decided to do something she's wanted to do since she was a teenage girl: straighten her teeth. Her two front teeth were crooked, you see, twisted in place by quite a large amount. Nobody really noticed this, of course, but she knew about it and was very, very insecure about her smile as a result. Those of you who've seen my earlier (sadly non-digital) photos of her will know that it's rare to actually see her smiling in a photo (or, rather, when she did smile, it was always a closed-mouth Mona Lisa-style one). Which was actually quite a shame because when she's smiling (naturally, that is) her face lights up like a pinball game that's just hit the "free game" jackpot.

September of 2006 marked her decision to move away from this. She went to the dentist, got evaluated, got four teeth pulled and thus began a two-year (maximum!) process of adjusting her teeth. This week, on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, the work was finally completed. Yes, the two-year maximum process took just under three years. Three years of discomfort and three years of metal in the mouth. Sometimes sharp metal. Even with metal in her mouth, however, Joan already started to smile properly and naturally, wearing the braces almost as a badge of honour.

Finally, however, it's over. Above and to the left you can see what Joan's smile looked like on Tuesday and to the right you can see what it looked like Wednesday. Pretty big change over a day, isn't it?

Of course it's still not completely over. She has retainers she has to wear 24x7 (except when eating) for a year, then nights-only for another year. She's had to relearn how to talk because the retainers occupy quite a bit of space in the mouth, but they're visibly much less intrusive than were the braces before.

In other news, and the reason for my delay in posting any news at all, I have officially signed my new contract at my new workplace. I'm moving over to the Hubei Provincial Communication Technical College (or something approximately like that which I'll translate better when I get the energy) in under a month and will be starting teaching there September of this year.

The general run-down on the new place:

• The staff are friendlier and more communicative than my current school, not to mention better organized and better capable of communicating in English.
  
• The salary is a bit higher, but so are the teaching hours (the hourly remuneration is about the same).
• The students are going to be of much, much lower quality than the main campus (and possibly even slightly lower quality than the Sweathogs campus).
• The new apartment is a bit smaller, but much more nicely outfitted (it has an air conditioner/heater in each room, for example).

Also, again unlike my current school, they're willing to let me move in over the summer. One thing that I really didn't like about ISSWHU the first year I was there (albeit about the only thing at the time since I hadn't been introduced to the Sweathogs yet) was that they positively refused to allow us to move in over the summer. Instead I had to stow my possessions at a friend's apartment and live in Joan's apartment in Hanyang over the summer and then hastily move everything in while I was also planning lessons and getting oriented in the new location just before I started teaching. Why? They didn't want to be responsible for me or my behaviour over the summer before I started working for them.

So the move is a mixed bag that, in my opinion, slightly tilts toward the "plus" side of the scales when I measure them.

No other particularly interesting news to report otherwise. I mean it's damned hot, but I think I've been complaining about that loudly to anybody who'd listen since I first got to China. (How hot? Try 35C at 84% humidity.) I am going to really enjoy living in an apartment where I don't have a single room-sized air conditioner trying to cool down a sizable two-bedroom apartment.

An exchange on Facebook of the "truth hurts" variety.

Names elided to protect the guilty.

You're blocking XXX? How come?

Something she did on my blog a few years back made me decide I'd rather exist in a world in which she does not exist. Since the digital world is easily adjusted to allow the editing of life, I proceeded to make the world I wanted.

What exactly did she do on your blog?

Was it the time she described you as cranky and sexist, or the time when she said you were turning 52 on your birthday, or was it the time she called you an adult baby, or was it the time...?

I will let her guess which time it was.

Those North American women. When will they learn just how spoiled they are, and bow down to your genius?

;-) Do you still feel that way?

Yeah, XXX can be tactless. Like me. I suppose it's why we get along. She actually asks me now and then to read over emails she is sending, where she is trying to say something subtle and difficult.

I suspect she still has unresolved anger over arguments with you. You know, stuff you said about women and their periods and how feminism is all bullshit.

I'd like to think being married and reproducing has changed you somewhat. Mike told me that you seemed to understand your wife is the boss, as it is with nearly all partnerships, I suspect.

I've been in therapy for a year now. I am getting my shit together. I even applied for an art show with the city of Ottawa. But lately I find myself getting in touch with old rage. And I suspect that's the real reason I'm talking to you lately. No one I've met has ever been better at rage than you.

I don't know if I mean that as a compliment or an insult.

Take all of this as you will.

I feel that way more than ever about North American feminists. When seeing women who have REAL problems in life it's hard to take seriously the whining of Canadian and American women.

As to the tactless thing, you pale in comparison to XXX. At your most tactless people still mostly liked you. At her least tactless people mostly tolerated XXX. She was put up with because you were liked -- a sort of "take the good with the bad" approach.

I have an advantage over these people. I don't have to put up with her at all. Nobody can (legally) edit a person out of their physical lives, but my life with my old crowd is all-digital now. I can edit anybody out I care to without having to get my hands bloody.

Please edit me out of your life too.

Why? If you want out of my life you just have to stop inserting yourself into it.

He took this to heart and blocked me on Facebook like I blocked his girlfriend. Nothing ends a friendly relationship than telling a guy that his girlfriend is a total and absolute bitch with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

A try at being serious.

Usually in this blog I'm flippant and irreverent, at least when I'm not angry. Since I've been challenged, however, to write something that's difficult and thoughtful I thought I'd first try my hand at being serious.

I'd like to introduce an old woman to you. She's nobody special. I mean obviously she was someone special to her family and friends, but on a scale beyond that she was nobody anybody knew about or would care to know about.

I saw this woman almost every time I walked between my home and the nearest supermarket or the nearby bus station. Say I saw her about three times a week. She was a shrivelled-up little thing. Short. Wrinkled. Every (visible) piece of flesh sagged under the weight of years. I would guess she was in her late seventies or possibly even older.

How can I guess her age? Whenever I saw her, she was sitting outside of the little house—shack, really—that served as her family home as well as a teeny cigarette and booze shop. The shack had four generations of people in it ranging from a child not much older than Lucas to this woman. A bit of math and I've got her in her late seventies and possibly even her early eighties.

This woman was in the deep throes of dementia. It was clear every time I saw her that she did not have much time left in this world. She would sit in a crudely-made bamboo chair under a piece of fibreglass sheeting propped up by a stick acting as a crude sunscreen and rain shelter in front of the family home, stare down at the ground and mumble to herself constantly. She didn't interact with anybody; her family would address her with respect and kindness, would take care of her, but she never really directly acknowledged them.

This was the normal state of affairs. Sometimes, however, she would, fleetingly, show glimpses of awareness of her surroundings. She might smile at what was probably her great-grandson, for example, and reach out to him. Or (and this is where I come in) she might actually look up at the world, see a stranger—a foreigner—and smile with almost childlike wonder. These moments were rare as far as I could tell. I maybe saw them once a month or less. It was their rarity and their unexpectedness that made them inexplicably valuable.

The more perceptive readers will have noted by now that I persist in using the past tense to speak of this woman. About two weeks ago, you see, something changed in that home and tiny shop. A large wreath suddenly occupied that primitive shelter in front of the shop that the woman sat in. Too, the house was alive with visitors: people smoking, people playing 麻将 (Mahjong) – people, in short, having a good time at all hours of the day and night for two days straight. I caught this at roughly 6PM and then again much later in the day. It was clear that the family was awake and active around the clock.

Why is this significant? That's how the Chinese mark a death. Think something along the lines of an Irish wake and you've got it about right. To help ease the spirit of the dead person into the afterlife you celebrate. You don't go to sleep (or, rather, more accurately, there's always somebody awake and active). In this way you drive off the evil spirits and calm the recently dead. Everybody in the family and in the circle of friends participates in this ritual to ensure that there's no time without the noise of a happy family.

Why else is this significant? That old lady I never knew anything about, but who would on infrequent occasions make eye contact with and reward me with a smile of purest wonder and joy, I've never seen since. When the wreath disappeared, so did she. I've never seen her sitting outside the little shop that was her home since.

This leaves me unaccountably sad.

OK, before Mom kills me...

...I should probably keep my promise, albeit two days delayed.

This is another Lucas entry people, so if you're not interested in a parent's obviously unbiased view as to his spawn being the cutest thing in the world, move along. I understand there's a blog featuring paint drying that's probably more interesting than this one will be.

So, I keep getting asked what Lucas is like. I keep getting stymied in trying to explain it. How, exactly, do you describe a whole personality in a few, short sentences? Lucas is a human being (if only just barely at times). And despite being under 18 months old he's still a complex creature. For example he's got "exhuberant, laughing bundle of joy" and he's got "cranky, whiny little thing". Talk about range! Jack Nicholson Heath Ledger's got nothing on him!

OK, snarky levity aside, I guess it's time to try and explain what Lucas is like. I'll supplement this with a few pictures.

From Lucas

In general Lucas is a joy. He's happy and mirthful and interested in everything around him. Even the things I don't want him to be interested in. Perhaps especially the things I don't want him to be interested in. You've all seen his happy, interested face in previous entries so I won't bother showing those. Direct your eyes to the picture on the left instead for what his face looks like when he doesn't get what he wants. What's happening there? He wants something and Daddy isn't giving it to him. So he's grabbing Daddy's leg and looking really cranky.

Now usually Lucas isn't cranky. He's cranky a little bit when he's tired but doesn't want to sleep. He's cranky a little bit when interested in something that we won't share with him. Otherwise, however, he's fine. Except when he's sick. Like he was this week, with a cold. See that cranky face above? Imagine a week of this. (This isn't to say that he's always cranky when he's ill. He's just cranky a whole lot more often and switches from giggling to cranky faster than Sichuan Opera singers switch masks.)

From Lucas

One of the other things you don't get to see much of in photos is Lucas sleeping. This is a tragedy, really, because it's one of the things that he's really, really good at. He sleeps with gusto (as you can tell from the photo gracing the right). A bed that's big enough to hold two adults (one of whom is known for being a restless sleeper no less) isn't big enough to hold Lucas without having a tent around him to prevent him from splitting his head when he rolls off. Like he did last night. The rolling off thing, I mean, not the splitting head. The tent on the bed (which, again, you can see in past pictures) saved him from everything except the fright of his life. His screeching howls brought three people to his room in about two heartbeats only to have him suffer the indignity of having those same three people laugh at his terror as we found him trapped at the foot of the bed by the tent. (I know this makes us awful human beings, but it was damned funny!)

From Lucas

Of course he doesn't always sleep in a bed. When Joan and her mother go shopping they bring Lucas along and Lucas often gets worn out from pointing at things and grabbing at things and in general getting overstimulated and overexcited by things. A lot of times when they return, the picture you see to the left is what I'm greeted with.

We generally just leave him in the stroller until he wakes up by himself. This could be hours later.

From Lucas

The walking thing that had us so scared earlier in the year has gone swimmingly. Lucas now trundles around under his own steam and turns our hair white one at a time as he does bone-headed things like walking into corners and door or stumbling over deceptively level floors. Luckily we have a harness rigged up on him that usually permits us to catch him before he hurts himself. The main problem here is that he just gets so excited with whatever has his attention that he forgets about small things like "balance" or "not being in the same place as hard objects". We don't always keep him in a harness, though, as you can see by the picture to the right. (The indistinct thing in the bowl, incidentally, is Lucas' very short-lived pet shrimp. No, I will not be explaining that any further.) Mostly we have him in the harness when outdoors (because falling there can be really bad) or when he's tired and his balance hits levels that in Canada would make a breathalyzer test mandatory.

So there's a thumbnail sketch of my son. The extrovert toddler inflicted upon to introvert parents. (I'm sure that I'm being paid back for something in a past life. Saṃsāra can be a real bitch.) I hope this has given enough of a taste that I stop getting hounded by a frustrated grandmother who has yet to meet her grandson. (In a similar vein I hope that peace breaks out in the Middle East and that I get a hunk of that green cheese from the Moon.)

A shift in direction...

For years Jeff has been my little hole in the Great Firewall that allowed me to download pornography access the web unhindered while living in China. Basically the Great Firewall is a joke that only stops lazy people and stupid people (neither of whom you really want on the Internet anyway, so you could view it as a public service). Jeff, very kindly, kept a server in his basement hooked up that allowed me to redirect all requests for web pages that were deemed a danger to the state here through a Canadian server that allowed such things.

About a month ago this server's connection went flaky and died. Jeff, being newly married and kind of in a complex part of life, didn't have the time to check it out. I didn't mind, though, because very few sites I really cared about got blocked. That changed this week as Blogger turned out to be a threat to the Chinese government. It became imperative that the problem get solved and, for some reason, Jeff was incommunicado.

I decided that it was really unfair to have Jeff be responsible for my free (as in freedom, not beer) Internet access and embarked on a project to change this. So as of today I have my own tiny, cheap VPS in the USA that runs my little backdoor to the rest of the Internet; the stuff the Chinese government thinks is too dangerous to be seen. Like my blog here. The one I'm posting. Telling you what a bunch of utter shitheads the Chinese government is for being afraid of my little key-clickings telling you harmless, inoffensive things about China (for the most part). Apparently I am a danger to the state. Funny, I don't feel any different from last week this time....

Mr. Hu Jintao? I want the six hours I spent debugging this setup back. Please mail it to me you frightened little child.

Ever have one of those days?

So...

I'm not sure how to begin this, to be honest. It's just too damned surreal a day. It started off normally enough. I woke up a half-hour before my alarm went off and stared at the ceiling because, for a change, I'd actually had had enough sleep. I had a nice leisurely shower and breakfast and then ambled off to work. I came home, did the job search thing, planned my week's lessons for Wuhuan Engineering and generally relaxed or played with Lucas or both.

3:15 rolls around and I hit the road. I got to Wuhuan way early and wound up playing a video wargame on my N800 for almost an hour before my classroom was opened. (They're way off out in the boondocks, you see, and bus service there can be very, very fast like today or I can wind up with scant minutes to spare because of snarling traffic. Yes, I said "snarling" there. It's called a pun. Look it up.)

Anyway, my teaching goes exceedingly well (I have a really good class in Wuhuan and love teaching there), but the first bit of surrealism invades at about that point. Joan calls about an hour in at 6PM. She'd forgotten I was off teaching you see and was on her way home from work when the batteries in her scooter ran out. She had called to see if I could come out and pick her up, taking the scooter home. Since I was about a three hour walk (more, even?) away that wasn't really feasible so the poor little girl wound up having to push her heavy scooter home a distance that's a good 20 minute walk for me at full speed without a load. And push the scooter up the hill. It's a pretty damned tall hill.

Anyway, I finish my teaching, catch the shuttle bus that takes me about half-way home and then the public bus that drops me off about a 25-minute walk from home. (About 5 minutes, yes, away from where Joan ran out of battery power.) As I get off the bus, I call Joan to make sure she got home OK. Had she left the scooter somewhere, you see, I'd have picked it up on the way seeing as I carry the keys with me for just such a possibility.

Joan made it home alright, but she wasn't in the apartment. Nor was her mother. Nor was Lucas. They were all stuck out in the hallway because Joan's mother had broken the key off in the lock at about 5PM after returning from some shopping. They were stuck outside and had already tried one locksmith and were on their second in getting the door opened. Needless to say I rushed home as quickly as I could, finding my family sitting in the stairwell while a locksmith hammered and picked and hammered and picked and hammered and picked and ...

Well, I got it in my head that perhaps food would be needed for the spud (and the rest of the family, but mostly the spud). It was 9PM by that time, however, and any of the places we'd have wanted to get appropriate foods from were closed. I was sent off on a mission to get some things and managed to find none of them. I instead had to get more expensive alternatives that were sorta-kinda the things we'd sent me out to get in the first place.

This emptied my wallet, incidentally, of all my spending money for the month.

This trip itself was a half-hour round trip so I got back shortly after 9:30 and, just as I pressed the elevator call button, I got the message that the door was opened and I didn't need to go get the food after all.

Lovely.

So how was your day?

Annoying aspects of life in China.

I went, at Joan's behest, to give a sample lesson at a language training school. I had misgivings about things even before we went and, to my intense depression, found that my misgivings were, if anything, optimistic.

First off, they wanted a 40-minute sample lesson. For a class of students ranging in age from 3 (!) to 9 (!!). This is, flatly, on the face of it, ludicrous. "Oh, they all have the same English level" is not a defence. A three-year old has the attention span of an average gnat while a nine-year old has the attention span of at least three gnats. Teaching to one will bore the other, no matter what.

Oh, and of course, I had about 15 minutes to prepare for this lesson. And nobody could tell me clearly what the students had or had not yet learned. "They've almost finished the first book." "How many units remaining?" "We've started on the second book." "So you've finished the first?" "We've almost finished." Ad nauseum.

So I assembled a lesson from nothing for an age group I have no experience with and an age range which is clearly ludicrous. Only to find out that the main teacher of the class was basically incapable of communicating in English. Joan had to do interpretation on those rare occasions where I needed instructions translated because the class teacher was utterly useless. And, of course, I had three-year olds mixed with nine-year olds.

To call the resulting lesson a travesty would be too unkind to real travesties.

Did I mention that it was incredibly hot as well? That we went an hour there and back for this? I didn't? Consider it mentioned now.

Yeah, so, well, I missed a day. Sue me.

Yesterday, courtesy of a week of insufficient sleep followed by a night with at most four hours of sleep I was a zombie come update time. I'd like to say that I decided not to write my blog but that's not what happened. Instead I sat at my keyboard and drooled lightly. No decision was involved at all.

I had my first Saturday session teaching at Wuhuan Engineering today. It went well. As is usual for adult students I had a class of motivated people willing to do what I told them even if sometimes they weren't quite sure why. (I always wind up explaining why, but I like to leave a bit of a sense of curiosity in my students at times to keep them interested.) The theme of this week's set of lessons was "learning how to learn" so I closed off the week with a semi-unregulated discussion consisting of them discussing (in English, this being the whole point) things like what they wanted from the course and how they viewed the relationship of teacher to student.

I got some surprisingly good thoughts from them. I really love teaching adult students.

In other news, it's hot now. Yesterday cracked 34C and today I think peaked at 35 or even 36. Even now, at 7PM, it's 31C. Thankfully we haven't hit the high humidity yet. It's only 55% which makes the current "feels like" temperature something like 35. Given that it's only early May, I think this summer is going to be a real scorcher to make up for last summer's mild summer.

Good news and bad news.

These always seem to come in pairs. (This is actually an improvement over how it used to work, so I'm not really complaining. Much.)

On the good news front, I started my 100-hour session with Wuhuan Engineering today. It was a delicious experience (as adult teaching in China always is because the students are highly motivated) and, at the end of the class, several students, independently, approached me to say how much they enjoyed the class. "I loved it!" as one young lady exclaimed.

On the bad news front it appears that I am not continuing to teach at ISSWHU next term. You may have noticed me referring to them as lacking communication skills (and competence, among other things) in my last post. This incident is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. On April 8th I got this in my email (all errors from original):

Secondly, could you let me what's your project about next semester, if you want still teaching in ISS ,please let me know as soon as possible. thanks!
If you want re-sign the contract ,and the Teaching office and students also approve your work, I will prepare the contracts as soon as possible, also , if you intend to leave, I will prepare your Lecommendation Letter for you.

I've highlighted the important part in bold text. This is typical of the way this school communicates. It commits to absolutely nothing until the last seconds. Every second word out of anybody's mouth is "maybe" or some functional equivalent thereof.

I'm not a moron, though. I replied with "sure", but also started my usual low-intensity job search because until I have a contract I consider myself as available. Indeed yesterday I gave a sample lesson/job interview at another school (which if I get the job could mean I won't even have to change apartments) because there was deafening silence from the ISS. Two weeks after they sent that message, in fact, I sent another email saying, basically, "I replied before but haven't heard anything so just in case it didn't make it through..." and again got deafening silence. Then, today, I got this email:

Firstly, many thanks for your hard work in our school these three years. You are a excellent English teacher.
But I am sorry to say that we have enough English teachers for next semester, so I am afraid we can not sign the contract with you. If you find a new school I will prepare the recommendation letter for you.

So what happened? Well this being China any number of things could have happened and nobody will ever bother to tell the truth. Maybe I stepped on some toes and someone behind the scene decided to get revenge. I consider this unlikely, however, since I've been here for three years and my behaviour hasn't really changed in that time. Had I been stepping on toes there would have been two previous opportunities to get rid of me.

The possibility I think likeliest is that the school is in financial trouble. The hints of this I already saw in my second year, second semester. The East Lake ("Sweathogs") campus has always been this school's cash cow. The main campus gives them a sort of legitimacy in that they give out real, recognized degrees there (they're real Wuhan University degrees with the Wuhan University stamp) while the East Lake campus is where the (very wealthy) dregs of China's educational system wind up. The gallows joke doing the rounds among the foreign teachers was that the school had a skill-testing question as its entrance requirement: "Are you willing to pay double the going legitimate rate to get a degree that is worthless? (The correct answer is 'yes'.)"

What happened, however, in year two, semester two of my time here was that half the students vanished. Vanished because the ISSWHU had its accreditation threatened, specifically because of the complete and utter lack of academic standards at the East Lake campus. The school had to divest itself of half (or even more than half) of its students at East Lake or face closure. That had to hurt income!

More clues arise over year three. Suddenly East Lake campus has an Italian guy and a Spanish guy teaching English, something that sounds an awful lot like cost-cutting to me. Also they reneged on a promise to me that I wouldn't have to teach out at East Lake. This sounds like it was a case of mollifying the administrator at that campus (who bizarrely seems to have more power than the Dean) who was probably upset at the difficulty in selling English lessons by non-native speakers. (The irony is that the two guys in question, despite being non-native speakers, are better English teachers than several of the previous native speakers were! Remember, appearances are what counts in any kind of business, not actual performance.) In addition my teaching hours got reduced from the first term (14 hours raised to 16 when one of the foreign teachers went back home to die) to the second (12 hours).

The big clue, however, is that even at the main campus they're losing students. I'm teaching the same four classes this term that I taught last term, but what I've noted is that all of my classes have shrunk. They all had 29 except for one at 36 last term, but this term my largest class has 29 and my smallest 21. Discussing it with other foreign teachers I'm also seeing that my shrinkage is on the lower end of the scale. One teacher reported a drop from 36 to 16 students. (I note here that this isn't students just not showing up to class. This is students who've moved on to another school!) Talking this over with some of my better-informed students I find out that the students in general are very disgruntled with the poor quality of education they perceive the school as providing. The better students stopped studying for their ISS classes and instead studied for a placement exam that would allow them to move to a better school. The rest are increasingly despondent and bitter. Only a few have done the "given lemons, make lemonade thing".

So why was I singled out for not being continued? Well, I'm the most expensive of the foreign teachers. A combination of better credentials, experience and a raise for year three probably made me the one to cut as the accounting death spiral begins.

Thankfully I'm a cynic and didn't put all my eggs in one basket, eh?

Film at 11.

I'll just let my son speak for himself again.

Mounting income.

So, the first request from the string of "I'll talk about that in the future" things in my last entry was for details about money. This came from Melissa Barna, the wife of the son of one of my mother's best friends. ("Confused? You will be on the next episode of Soap!") So, Melissa, this one is for you!

The school I currently work for is not especially generous (nor communicative, nor competent, nor...). Actually none of the government-run schools in Wuhan is especially generous unless they're off in the "suburbs" (the locals' term for the farmland surrounding the city) and desperate for people willing to live away from anything resembling civilization. The practical upshot of this is that at 4700元 per month, I'm not exactly rolling in cash. A single person can live very comfortably off of this, but with three more people (one a toddler with all the expenses this entails) it becomes, well, not a strain but more bland a lifestyle. And it's definitely not conducive to building up a good savings account. This is why, of course, I ignore my contract and do extra work outside of the school. (Everybody does it and contracts are basically wallpaper here anyway, so it's not as if I'm doing anything risky.)

One job I've had lined up since October of last year is a three-hour weekly stint at a local middle school. My weekly salary at 12-16 hours (currently 12) with my main school is 1085元. Adding an extra three hours of teaching boosts that by 450元 because I'm being paid 150元／hour in the sideline job. (By way of comparison my main job's hourly rate ranges from 68 to 90元/hour depending on how many hours I've been assigned.) So basically it's a nice almost 50% boost to my pay (from 1085 to 1535元/week) that does the family good and it's not a whole lot of extra work.

There is, however, another job I do. It's an infrequent one, but it's incredibly lucrative. A local engineering firm does a lot of international business. They take the ability of their employees to communicate with foreign business partners and customers very seriously and, as a result, have embarked upon a very ambitious project of upgrading all of their employees' English language skills.

A former colleague of mine worked contract for them for a couple of years. Last summer he was told that the company wanted to run two courses and asked him to recommend another English-speaking language instructor. Now for a variety of reasons (this is China, after all) the original plan fell through, but I guess they were impressed by me in the interview, so when the usual fall course opened they had me split hours with Peter. (I originally felt a little uncomfortable with this because it felt like I was being used to replace Peter, but Peter had by then gotten an even more lucrative, full-time position so he didn't mind.)

The courses they run are 100 hours in length, 10 hours per week. And they pay a whopping 280元/hour. That's more than three times my hourly rate even this term where I'm teaching only 12 hours a week in my main school. And it's almost double the rate I'm paid by the middle school. This means that my weekly income is now 4335元. So by taking two extra jobs I'm almost quadrupling my base weekly income for the next ten weeks and I'm almost tripling my previous total income with just that one job!

I worked it out. Last year I only got 7 hours out of the 10 per week (with Peter getting the remaining 3) so I earned from that company 19,600元 for that one session. That's 4 months of my base salary, by way of comparison. This time around my total income from that company is going to be 28,000元; about six months of my salary at my main school. Thus for a lot fewer total hours of teaching (albeit more preparation work being required since each 10-week course is about 3 terms of English teaching hours!) I'm getting about the same amount of money. (The school only pays me ten months out of the year, you see.)

On top of that, the school still has the added problem that I hate half the students! I'm still teaching the Sweathogs, though at least now it's fewer hours than teaching my real students. By comparison even the worst of the engineering company's students are well-motivated and hard-working. So I'm getting less money, more work and students I hate. What's keeping me teaching here?

Well, this is where China's systems work against me. To stay in China I need a job with an employer sanctioned by the state to hire foreigners. And to be fair to my school I get a few benefits from them to go along with the headaches of incompetent administration, poor facilities and, in many cases, terrible students. One of those benefits is a rent-free apartment; another, subsidized utilities.

Still, for two 10-week sessions I make as much money as my main "real" job. If I could get a third one guaranteed that would more than cover my costs of having a business visa, renting my own apartment (or paying for a mortgage on one) and would leave me with a whole lotta hours to fill with other possible ventures (or a whole lot more hours to spend with my boy watching him grow while driving his mother and grandmother insane).

Yeah, I'm still working the angles.

Back in the saddle.

From Lucas

So, it's been almost a month since my last update and I've had several people (Roger, Karim, Barb, Mom) nagging at me to update finally. And you know what? They're right. Yes, I've been a busy little sleep-deprived beaver, but that's not a good enough reason to ignore the blog completely.

From Lucas

So, to make up for this, I'm (tentatively) committing myself to updating this blog every day from today (Tuesday) until Saturday. Then I've put my blogging commitments every Sunday in my Google Calendar (which I am also tentatively committing to keep up to date) so that you know without having to nag what's up.

From Lucas

OK. So this is going to be another Lucas post. After a partial application of the treatment (we pulled him early because of a bad respiratory illness contracted while in the hospital), Lucas has had a near-miraculous improvement. He's now walking, verging on running, like a champ (presuming, of course, that champions routinely stumble and wind up just this side of falling flat on their faces only because their parents or grandmother has cat-like reflexes combined with a sixth sense for baby stupidity). When I squint right, I still see hints of the problem that he has, but he's adapted really well once shown the way and, so far, we've seen no strong need to return him for a second round. (We may still do that, however, especially with the recent two-month-and-a-bit tripling of my salary which I'll get into in a later post.) On top of everything, Lucas has, since his treatment, been in general a whole lot more cheerful (and cheerfully destructive, which again will be highlighted in a later post).

From Lucas

And he's car-obsessed. Which again, you guessed it, will be highlighted upon in a later post.

So what will I be talking about in this post? Well, frankly, not much of anything. I thought I'd let my son talk for himself in the medium of being too damned cute for the camera.

The Secret to Good Postal Service

I live in a "communist" (more properly "socialist") country. Well, in name anyway. (In reality the world's lowest concentration of actual communists is in the Chinese Communist Party.) As such I live in, at least by popular perception, a surveillance state in which every move I make is watched by the agents of the state. This paranoid worldview has some merit, of course. Just to make sure people don't think I've gone native and am acting as an apologist for China's government let me make it abundantly clear: the Chinese government is evil. More evil, even, than the American government or the Canadian government. (The fact that the Dalai Lama is more evil than the Chinese government is a separate issue that I'll address at some other point.) The problem with using the word "evil", however, is that to most people this brings up comic book imagery—evil for the sake of doing evil—and that is patently not true. The evil has a purpose and a direction and, as a result, can actually be dealt with. We are not talking psychopaths exhulting in their service to evil here, we're talking normal people without the usual checks and balances that other, slightly less evil, societies place upon them.

So why am I babbling about evil as a precursor to talking about good postal service? Well, it's instructional, you see. Most expatriates living in China have the cartoon version of evil in their heads and are convinced that lurking behind every wall and around every corner is an agent of the 公安 (Public Security Bureau, a.k.a. police) just waiting to do something hopelessly evil for kicks. My first teaching partner in Jiujiang was that way. She would tell me tales in hushed breath of finding a microphone concealed inside a Santa Claus candle that was only exposed because the candle burned down to the point where you could see it. (She told it as a first-person story. Oddly enough, so have about two dozen other people from all around the country which leads me to believe that either these people are all passing along an urban legend as personal fact or that Santa Claus candles are very common surveillance tools spread all over China. I know which I believe.)

There I go again, talking about evil and not about postage. Well, the thing is, you see, that China Post is known for opening mail. Packages especially. Most expatriates have had lots of experience with getting packages in the mail that had been very obviously opened, rifled through and then passed on to them. And, of course, this leads to suspicions that things have been removed. (In many cases things have been removed, in fact.)

I don't have this experience. In eight years of living here I've had two packages opened and three which went astray. (There was also one that was delayed by a humourous whole year.) And the reason why? Basic psychology at work.

Yes, China Post opens mail. (So does Canada Post, incidentally. And every other mail system in the world. But since they're not labelled with the "communist" pejorative people assume it's for a "good" reason.) The trick to not getting your mail opened is to be aware that the people opening it aren't comic book villains. They're underpaid, overworked ordinary people just like you. In short, they're lazy. Just like you. If they have a choice of packages in front of them to inspect, they're going to take the one that's easy to open. The packages my mother sends (like the one I got today) are no such thing. My mother probably single-handedly props up various tape manufacturing companies' stock prices just by the way she packages the boxes. At least five metres of tape wrap every parcel. The parcel I got today might have had a grand total of 20 square centimetres untaped. This is not a parcel that's easy to open. This is the kind of parcel that an overworked, underpaid worker just like you is going to pass over in favour of another parcel that's got thin paper wrapping it (if any) and a few pieces of tape strategically placed to hold it in place.

That is how you get good postal service in China.

Settling down to the new routine.

So, the last couple of weeks have been very crazy and I lacked all energy and desire to think about my life at all, not to mention telling people about it. Things have settled down (somewhat), now, so I'll do a brief recap.

Lucas' medical problem is definitely not a serious version. There is every indication, in fact, that he could have learned to walk on his own and just been a little odd-looking while doing it for the rest of his life. There's even the possibility that there isn't a problem at all and that he's just a slow developer walking-wise. Still, that being said, I support the therapy for him. It's really simple analysis:

1. We don't do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. He's saddled with it for life. (bad outcome)
   
2. We don't do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)
   
3. We do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. The therapy helps him. (good outcome)
4. We do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)

If we don't do the therapy, we've got one bad possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. If we do the therapy we've got one good possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. (I'm not factoring in the cost of the therapy because the analysis is specifically for "should we spend the cash?" I'm also not putting in pessimistic evaluations like "we do the therapy and it makes things worse" for reasons I'll outline below.) Basically the answer writes itself, doesn't it?

Anyway, after some serious adjustments to lifestyles, we've settled into a new routine. I've had glimpses of his treatment in bits and pieces over the last little while but today, courtesy of visiting friends of Joan's mother and my own availability because of the national holiday (Grave-Sweeping Day), I got the whole picture and can paint a copy of it for those of you who haven't fallen asleep because of Yet Another Lucas Blog Entry (YALBE). Here's what my son goes through every day.

First he's bundled up and taken to the hospital. Upon arrival he's scheduled for the "neural channel balance" treatment. When the time comes, he's taken into the torture chamber treatment room and hooked up to the machine. The first round, for ten minutes, has electrodes on his wrists and at his elbows. He's given low-voltage, low-amperage shocks about 2.5 times per second making his muscles twitch. He hates this with a passion and starts squalling along with the 10-15 other babies in the room being given the same indignities. After a few minutes of this he stops squalling and just whines a lot. Now I'll point out that this treatment is not painful (I tried it out once for a lark as a form of exercise a few years back). It's just really, really annoying and to a baby undoubtedly really, really frightening.

After the ten minutes on the arm, the electrodes are moved to the ball of the foot and the back of the knee and he's left twitching there for 20 minutes. He hates this even more and squalls the entire time, exhausting himself. When this is finished he's moved to a different machine and hooked up behind the ears. I don't know what this particular machine is called since the labelling is all in Chinese, but it doesn't seem to cause any visible twitching. Further, once the electrodes are glued on and the machine turned on, Lucas slowly relaxes and, because of the exhaustion from the first two rounds, falls asleep. This goes on for 30 minutes.

Once the electroshock neural channel balance treatment is completed, he's moved over to physiotherapy. There a very nice doctor (and very patient, something he has to be to deal with a child as strong and wilful as my son!) puts Lucas through his paces. Now in the past, according to Joan, Lucas actively fought with the doctors. I saw no signs of this today, however. He didn't cry. He didn't struggle (much). He whined at a couple of things, but mostly he just patiently endured and played with Joan and I while the doctor forced his feet and legs into proper postures and held him there for a while. (The one time he whined loudly, but not quite cried, had the doctor forcing him to squat and stand repeatedly for about five minutes straight.) This goes on for about 40 minutes. After that Lucas is left free to crawl (and walk!) around the physiotherapy room with its padded floors and walls (not to mention the large selection of toys and balls, the former supplied by the various parents in the room who share with each other).

Some of the equipment in this room amused me. It looks very basic and unsophisticated, like a rustic's notion of a hospital, but each piece was actually quite well-designed for its task. One piece, for example, for assisting with balance, is basically a platform with a V-shaped bottom. The doctor stands on the platform, helping the baby stand, and then rocks the platform back and forth. In a western hospital this would be an expensive piece of electrical equipment, likely computer controlled, but in the end would do exactly the same thing -- just for a thousand times (literally) the price. Sometimes the technology fetish of the west amuses me.

Anyway, back to Lucas' day.

This is his lunchtime. Normally he's taken back to his bed in the hospital and is fed, but today was special. We dragged him out of the hospital and into a restaurant with Joan's mother and the visiting friends. After that we returned to the hospital for the manual torture massage therapy. Again Joan insists that he usually fights the doctor and screams loudly, and to give her credit the other babies in the room (six tables, four were active) were certainly lending credence to this report. Whatever the reason, though, Lucas today just slept through it. I mean that literally. He slept through 30 minutes or so of the 45-minute massage.

The doctor was very good. Very strong, but very skillful, fingers worked over my boy quickly, precisely, firmly and yet gently. (I wish I could find a masseuse like that for my back!) Lucas woke up toward the end, when the massage moved up to his head, and he started a low-grade whining when the masseuse started working on his head around his face. Otherwise, however, he was having more fun playing with Joan and me than he was having annoyance at the massage. This despite the fact that all around him were babies screaming at the top of their lungs as they were manipulated up and down the entire length of their bodies.

Then it was time to come home again, Lucas cheerful, practically bubbling and me silently bursting with pride when I mentally compared his behaviour with that of the other babies I saw. (That same comparison, incidentally, is why I so confidently assert that his problem is not a serious one.) I also left with considerably more respect for Chinese hospital treatment than I went in with. Chinese hospitals are still a little weak on germ theory, it seems, but surgery and now physiotherapy they're both top-notch at in my opinion.

Judging the RCMP fairly.

According to William Elliot, the Commissioner of the RCMP, we should not judge the RCMP unfairly in the Robert Dziekanski affair. I agree with him fully. We should be 100% fair in our judgement. We should listen to the evidence impartially and then reach our conclusion. Only then should the RCMP be disbanded and replaced with a force that has civilian oversight of its operations.

The problem Mr. Elliot is having is that the fair facts are utterly damning of his organization. The more facts spill out in this inquiry, the more utterly damned the RCMP comes out. The force has lied, cheated and even attempted outright theft to keep these facts from coming out and, as a result, has lost any and all credibility it may once have had.

The latest (and last) of the four state-protected killers (I refuse at this point to call them "police officers" any longer) has finally given his version of events. This was the guy in charge of the goon squad that killed Robert Dziekanski and his testimony is the most risible of all, and the most inadvertantly revealing. One thing that I missed before (quite possibly because it wasn't reported) is that the four killer goons were sitting down to a meal when they got the call. I think this is an important thing to remember when reconstructing what likely really happened. He also claimed, in the most farcical portion of testimony so far (and when you consider the previous testimony about the threatening stapler position that's really saying something!), that in the ten minutes it took the goon squad to go from their meal to Dziekanski that they didn't exchange a single word. Just how stupid do these people think we are?

Let me piece together what likely happened to lead to Dziekanski's death.

1. Bureaucratic bungling beyond all reasonable (and most unreasonable) levels left Robert Dziekanski tired, confused, dehydrated and distraught stuck in a foreign country where nobody could or would speak with him.
2. He "acted up" as a result. (Anybody who feels this is not a 100% expected outcome should try it themself sometime: being confied in a tin can for twelve hours followed by ten hours of wandering around an increasingly hostile place with no food, no water and no communication.)
3. A call goes in and interrupts four hyper-macho thugs in uniform at their meal.
4. The four decide to get in, get the job done and get out in the quickest possible way. I submit the interruption of their meal predisposed them to using force and violence just out of raw anger.
5. They follow their plan (and yes, I believe they planned this).
6. Dziekanski didn't act the meek, docile sheep they wanted to see, so they tazed him multiple times as a show of power. A show of who's the sheepdog and who's the sheep, so to speak.
7. In a staggering display of callousness they don't take the time to monitor the person they've just electrocuted five times. (Were I a snide bastard I'd suggest they were planning how they were going to continue their meal.)
8. In a continuing display of said callousness they refuse to take the handcuffs off when an emergency treatment team requests it, convinced that the by-now-dead Dziekanski (who they probably thought was unconscious) posed a horrible threat to the four burly, armoured men around him.
9. Oops. He was dead already. Time for the cover-up to begin.
10. They consulted with each other to make their notes tell the same story.
11. Oops. Someone had video.
12. They confiscate the video for "the investigation".
13. The goons' superiors and the RCMP public relations weasels cook up a story that made the killers' actions sound reasonable. They increased the amount of screaming and violence from their victim from zero to a credible danger while reducing the number of officers involved from four to three.
    
14. Oops. The person with the camera isn't docile sheep and wants his video back.
15. Oops. The video makes it to the media.
16. Oops. The media does its job for a change and shows what really happened.

Now if William Elliot and the rest of the RCMP leadership were smart, they'd just 'fess up at this point and say "the officers in question screwed up, as did our training and leadership". But that's not what they do. Instead they circle the wagons and go in all out Massada mode. They pile lie on lie, prevarication on prevarication and build up a teetering, wobbly stack of shit that is now sliding down in a brown avalanche and staining the RCMP's reputation (along with the rest of the country's!) in the process.

And they're still too stupid to see that it's the end.

This is why I think it's time to disband the RCMP and replace them with a real police force with real oversight. I don't want people as stupid as the RCMP have shown themselves to be to be in charge of our national safety and security. If we're going to have criminals running things, at least, for God's sake, let them be smart criminals for a change!

...on the other hand...

I ended off my last blog post on Sunday with a chipper thing about surprises I like. Today's blog entry is a not-so-happy one.

It starts with happy news, of course. Today marks the third year since Joan, in a weird fit or something, decided that she'd actually spend the rest of her life with me. The fact that I've been blessed with this for three years makes the rest of my life worthwhile. Lucas' addition to the family over fourteen months ago amplifies this.

The event has been overshadowed, however, by some bad news. (Indeed the event almost passed me by unnoticed.) Yesterday Lucas was at the hospital to check into something that worried Joan and her mother. It turns out I should have been worried too.

Lucas' slow development in walking is not because of normal variance in children picking up the skill. He has been diagnosed as having something called "Central Coordination Disturbance". This seems, on my digging, to be a code phrase for "Cerebral Palsy". Specifically, it seems, that the version of CP in question is "Spastic Diplegia". Caught early enough there is treatment for it that can bring it under control and give him a semblance of a normal life in terms of walking, etc. He'll never be graceful or nimble (no world-famous athlete or dancer here), but if the treatment works he'll at least be able to look somewhat normal while walking or possibly even running.

Of course treatment is open-ended and expensive (and, naturally, not at all guaranteed to be effective). How expensive? Savings-account draining expensive. The minimum cost is 4000RMB for a twenty-day course of treatment. I make 4700RMB per month. Do the math and you see bank accounts draining to zero in no time at all. (Thankfully I married someone who is good at saving or there wouldn't be a savings account to even start draining!)

This is the final nail in the coffin of my teaching. I was getting tired of dealing with the spoiled brats of China's wealthy, self-proclaimed elites already. Now I have an added incentive to leave: teaching just doesn't pay enough. It's time to go back into software for real.

Anybody who knows a friend who knows a friend who knows someone who's looking for a seasoned software developer, please feel free to pass on my email address (ttmrichter@gmail.com), my GoogleTalk address (ttmrichter@gmail.com) or my YIM address (michael_richter_1966). I'm in the market again.

Surprises

The growth of a child kind of creeps up on you. You just all of a sudden notice, for example, that the kid you were once able to comfortably hold with one hand and your forearm is now so big that you can't hold him up high enough to keep his feet of your chest while playing on the bed. (You also find out that the kid you used to be able to toss around like a baseball now throws your crippled back when you try it. I learned that the hard way this week.)

It's the intellectual development, however, that sneaks up on you the most quietly, especially in the pre-vocal stage. Its difficult to spot what the child is learning because there's no quick feedback like you'd get if the child could talk.

We got some feedback from Lucas this week.

A long time ago we got this flashcard/book type of affair with pictures of animals in it. Patiently his grandmother, his mother and I would show him pictures and say the name of the animal. (In Chinese at this point. Starting next month he gets the same treatment in English.) At first Lucas was uninterested in them (except for wanting to eat them). After that he just wanted to play with the cards, fanning them out from the rivet that binds them all in one corner, bending them and generally being his destructive self on them. He also enjoyed touching the pictures and running his finger along the edges. There was, however, no sign that he understood the language at all. (That pre-vocal thing and all that.)

Then the hammer dropped this week. While playing with Lucas, Joan asked him (in Chinese) "Where's the dog?". She was, of course, referring to his favourite pal, the Snoopy-like stuffed dog. The cards, however, happened to be out and fanned open and the picture of the dog (a dalmatian) was exposed. Instead of pointing to his favourite pal, Lucas reached across and pointed at the picture of the dog. This sent a wave of excitement through the family and poor Lucas was pestered for the entire length of his attention span (roughly twenty seconds) with "where's the lion?" and "where's the tiger?" and "where's the elephant?" and such questions. He very ably identified the animals (even some of the more difficult ones). He'd confuse the lion and tiger quite often and sometimes got the chimpanzee mixed up with the monkey. But overall his comprehension of those words was better than my Sweathogs' would be given the same vocabulary.

These are the kinds of surprises I like in my life.