The Cow Arrived

Lucas slept through it without so much as a whimper. Despite it getting so loud it was impossible to hear people speaking.

Happy 牛 Year!

The title, for those who can't see Chinese characters (and those who can't read them even if they can see them) says "Happy Niu Year" where "niu" means "cow" (we're entering the year of the cow) and it's vaguely pronounced like "New" (in reality like KNEE-OWE done as a single syllable).

As I start typing this it's 9PM on the eve of Spring Festival (a.k.a. Chinese New Year). As is traditional, the family has had a delicious lunch (stuffed lotus root, lotus root and spare rib soup, Wuxi-style spare ribs, a local green with no English name, cold sliced beef with green chilis and a meatball/mushroom dish) followed later on by a delicious dinner of the traditional dumplings (consider them to be Chinese pierogies and you're about right) that you're supposed to eat for the holiday. And, of course, I'm reporting to you live from ... well, Baghdad is quieter now, so let's say I'm reporting to you live from the Gaza Strip. Firecrackers are going off all around me (it's traditional to set off a string of them before eating) and in preparation for the actual new year people are already letting off fireworks.

This is going to get louder, much louder, in three hours when midnight hits. It's an experience that can't be described to anybody who hasn't been through it (or through something similar like a really vicious firefight). The individual pops and explosions of fireworks will not be distinguishable when the real show starts. It will instead be an insanely loud roar that even closing all the windows and doors will do little to alleviate.

It's glorious!

This will be Lucas' second Spring Festival, but this time he might actually be awake to watch the fireworks in the sky. (Last year he was far too young to see anything, really.) I'm looking forward to his reaction to the fires in the sky.

I'll say something tomorrow about all this assuming: a) I survive the experience again, and b) I remember.

It always works out in the end.

So, I did my usual holidays thing and missed what day it was. As a result I didn't do my Sunday update. This turns out to be for the best, however, because it saves me the effort of making two posts and it gives me the opportunity to expound at length on some of the mystifying aspects of Chinese culture.

Today was the 19th of January and, while I was enjoying one of those rare mornings where I can sleep in after having gotten a decent night's sleep, the phone suddenly rang. It was about 8AM or so. Joan's cousin was calling. She and her family were on the way to visit. (Consider how an average Canadian family would react to being told—not asked, note!—that someone was on their way to visit. Directly from sleep. With one hour being a possible arrival time. Maybe two. Most Canadian families would go ballistic over this. For Chinese families this is the norm.) So up we got in a rush. For a change this wasn't a case of Joan just forgetting to tell me that visitors were coming today (she does this often) but was instead a complete surprise to her as well. Like a well-oiled machine we leaped into action. Joan fed the baby, I showered, Joan's mother made breakfast (热干面 – Wuhan-style "hot dry" noodles). Then I ate, got the baby handed to me while Joan swept the floors.

Arrival time was 9, maybe 10. So they arrived by 11. (The culturally-German in my audience are already grinding their bicuspids into powder here. I can hear it all the way over in China!) By this point the house was in passable shape and ready for the comedy to ensue. You see, the family was over for Lucas' birthday. They screwed up a little, though, seeing as Lucas was born on the 9th and they thought it was the 19th, but still their hearts were in the right place. That and they came bearing gifts including a sizable 红包 ("red envelope") with an embarrassing amount of cash in it.

A decent visit was had by all, partially courtesy of Joan's mother's ability to cook up a fancy, sizable meal from nothing on short notice: beef and carrot hot pot, "mountain medicine" (a weird sort of yam, I think) with pork, stir-fried cucumber and sausage, mixed vegetables, chicken feet, and a few more dishes which escape my memory now.

It is this whole thing working out in the end that always mystifies me with Chinese culture. These are some of the most disorganized people I've ever met in my entire life. I have never seen people who plan so much for so little effect, for example. (That is when planning is done at all. In personal lives it rarely is.) Yet, somehow, everything gets muddled through to a satisfactory conclusion. I wish I could learn this trick. Life would be a lot more relaxing if I could just know in the back of my mind that things always work out (in a muddled way) at the end.

Speaking of muddled things (nice segue for talking about Lucas, isn't it?!): Lucas was a champ for most of the day. Cheerful, charming, etc. All the things he's famous for. Unfortunately this ended (thankfully after our guests left) this afternoon. He's constipated, you see, and he's really unhappy about it. And he makes this unhappiness known at a very high volume.

Medical

Lucas was taken to the hospital today for his routine checkup. He is in perfect health. He's been officially measured to be 79.5cm tall (~2' 7") and 12.1kg (~27lbs).

Weekend Update

As promised, here's my Sunday update.

Aside from Lucas' birthday (about which I've already posted) this has been a nice, relaxing week. I haven't had classes and the paperwork I have to do is on hold because I have no idea when or where to send it. Sometime soon I'm going to get a panicked call from the Foreign Office asking me when I'll hand in my marks and after that I'm on my own until school starts again sometime in February. (The FO in this school has simply the worst communication skills I've ever encountered in my life. They're not actively evil like my previous school. They're just incredibly incompetent.)

I've been spending some time assembling what I need to make Joan's new computer something that's useful to her and which I can actually understand when the time comes for me to fix problems. The major problem I have right now is when Joan has a problem with her computer (my old Sony laptop from 2003) I can't be of much help. It's all in Chinese, and Joan doesn't know the technical terms in English. Trying to diagnose a problem when I have to wait for her to translate (badly) every piece of text on a dialogue box, guess what it really says and then try to see if I can fix it is not good for my sanity.

So what's my solution? Well, I've managed to track down a copy of Windows XP Professional in English. I've also managed to pick up the "MUI" (Multilingual User Interface) pack for it that includes Chinese. I snarfed a copy of Office 2007 and am in the process of tracking down the Chinese Language Pack for that as well. I've used a virtual machine on my laptop to test out the configuration and make sure everything works as expected. The result is, when I've finally got it all installed on Joan's machine, a computer that has everything in place for her to work in her native language, but which will allow me to work in my native language should any problems arise.

Have I mentioned at all just how much I hate Windows these days?

From Lucas

Anyway, no other particularly interesting news to report. I did have someone ask me what Lucas' favourite toy is. Before his birthday I would have responded that his favourite toy was his stuffed dog that looks almost, but not quite, completely unlike Snoopy. Every morning when he gets dumped on our bed to play, he always spots the dog and starts pointing at it making "Ah! Ah!" sounds quite adamantly, and if we don't get it for him (and by "we" of course I mean "me") he gets a little bit upset.

Things change, however, and it's looking like that house I got him for his birthday (you can see a piece of it in one of Friday's pictures) is topping the list. He's still asking for the dog and still gets upset if you don't give it to him, but now the dog mostly lies there disregarded except for an occasional pounce. The rest of the time is spent with him puzzling over the house.

Life is good.

This just in...

Usability note: the pictures can be clicked for a full-size version.

From Lucas

Today was Lucas' first birthday. Mini-me (as I call him in a fit of "originality") or Rice (as I call him when I want to do cross-language puns—"rice" in Chinese is "大米" which is pronounced similar to "dummy") has disrupted my life for a full year and, in that time, has accomplished many important things, to wit:

1. He has managed to avoid being returned to the hospital together with a request for a refund.


2. He has managed to avoid being "accidentally" left behind in a public place for others to stumble over and take home.


3. He has managed to avoid being sold to some poor, unsuspecting people blinded by his cuteness and unaware of his darker side.

Of course he has accomplished all of this by just being too cute for words. He's very lucky he's cute, given how often he drives his mother, his grandmother and me to distraction (in decreasing order of incidence).

From Lucas

Lucas' birthday was full of activity. For me at any rate. Yesterday, already, I had gone out to order a birthday cake and in the morning I got up and went to the bakery to pick it up. I was 100% in charge of the birthday cake and I got a good one, I think. Lucas was born in the year of the pig, so the piglet-face cake seemed perfect. I think the bakery did a good job with it, but I'll let you be the judge of it.

From Lucas

For his first birthday presents Lucas received:

1. A toy "mobile phone" with a changing picture, two different opening and closing sounds, a talk button that plays one of several different melodies at random and digit buttons that play one of twelve different touch-tone numbers at random. (No, there's no link between the button you press and the sound you get. I thought this was funny.)


2. A remote controlled car. (I won't get into why we bought this, but it was only 30RMB and is actually pretty damned sophisticated.)


3. An activity play center for children 1-3 years of age that plays music, has the blocks and shaped holes thing and a few other things. Lucas has already really taken to this. You can see a bit of it in the picture here.

From Lucas

There's a fun tradition the Chinese do for the first birthday that I thought I should describe. In the pictures on my web album (click any of the photos here to get there) you'll see that Lucas is on the bed surrounded by a lot of things: his toys, of course, but also a musical instrument, my hand-held computer, an abacus, books, an MP3 player, etc. The idea is that you do this and the thing he shows the most interest in is the thing that will dominate his life. If he picks up a pen and plays with it, for example, he's going to be a famous writer. If he picks up a musical instrument and toys with it he'll be a musician. If he goes for a book, he'll be a great scholar. That sort of thing.

From Lucas

I'm happy to report that Lucas spent most of his time with my portable computer (the N800) and with a musical instrument. I approve of both of these choices and I look forward to watching Lucas' career with either one of the two.

From Lucas

One last tradition to report is the traditional birthday food. In the west the birthday food is cake. In China it's "long life noodles". You can see a bowl of them here. Of course at one Lucas can't eat all of that (although he does eat most of its ingredients now! As a result we had to take up the slack for him. If you look at that bowl, however, you can see why it leads to long life. It doesn't get much more nutritious than that witches brew of noodles, vegetables, mushrooms and pork!

That's it for this special report; I'll be back on Sunday with the regular update. As I said before, click on any of those pictures to access the photo album for more pictures of the birthday event. I'll just leave you with one more picture: a family greeting of sorts. (I'll leave it up to you to find the picture of us trying to get Lucas to stop eating a book.)

From Lucas

Reboot

OK, so it's been a while. I've had a busy year with a son who's driving everybody in the family nuts. He should be VERY thankful that he's cute because there are time when this has been the only thing saving him....

How cute is he? Just follow the link and decide for yourselves. Here's a little clue, though: I really, really, really do not like babies. They're ugly. They're smelly. They're noisy. They're just all-round irritating. Except for Lucas. Lucas is none of those. Well, OK, smelly he is at times. Noisy he is most times when he's awake. He can be irritating at times. But he's not ugly!

This is a new year and with it comes a new resolution. I've been slacking off on the blog—this time for over nine months!—and this is not good. People who matter to me are finding it hard to keep up with my life because we're not online at the same time very often and when we are one or the other of us invariably has to leave soon. So I've decided to try and commit to a blog entry once per week, on a Sunday, barring major dysfunction in my life.

There is something that would help with this, of course, and that is this weird concept called feedback. Part of what has been demotivating me in blogging is getting no feedback unless I practically beg for it on my hands and knees. Please! I know some of you have subscribed by email or by RSS. And those of you reading the web page, just look down at the part below that mentions comments. Give me feedback! If I knew for certain that my posts were being read and appreciated, I'd have far more motivation to keep things up to date.

As an afterthought, it would also be nice to know what kinds of things you find interesting. After seven and a half years in China, what's around me is my life. It's normal to me. I've lost the ability to tell when things are weird or interesting because weird and interesting are so subjective that there's no way for me to know which is which. My 老外 (foreigner) eyes are almost gone. So I'll need some guidance here for what you want to know about.

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That being said, here's a proper update. Today was not an auspicious beginning for my re-found desire to blog. Lucas was a pain all night—constantly waking up and fussing—and by morning he had become intolerable. I was beginning to understand what parents whose babies have colic go through. Constant crying, no respite for any reason. That was my Lucas.

It turns out he was constipated. (You emphatically do not want to know how this was figured out. Just trust me on this.)

After the problem with his constipation was settled, Lucas was his usual, cheerful, giggling, overactive, extroverted self again. You know, the boy that made me realize that having a son wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. (Joan and I both wanted a daughter, you see, but the universe mocked us both and gave the introverted parents an overactive, extroverted boy.) Sure he drives his mother and his grandmother to distraction at times. (Both of them have a tendency to try and control him. This does not work. I just ride things out with him and gently direct him away from whatever he's doing and as a result get along with my sanity mostly intact.) Sure he's noisy. Sure he's disrupted every aspect of everybody's life. But he's so damned cute about it! How could I not love him?

Speaking of Lucas (like that's going to be rare now!), his birthday is five days away. We bought him his presents already and I'll have some pictures of his birthday party. In contravention of Chinese tradition we're not going to have a big do with the family for reasons which are complicated to explain but basically boil down to not wanting to get into the game of escalating gift-giving. The pictures will show a modest celebration and a birthday boy who will have his first exposure to birthday cake.

That's it for this update. Next week, when my vacation is finally in full swing (I still have to calculate and turn in marks tomorrow), I'll update you on my work situation.