How to spoil a birthday in one easy step...

Get struck down by fever.

So yesterday was Lucas' second birthday, but I got some nasty virus or other and spent most of the day and well into the night wandering in and out of semi-consciousness. I basically missed his second birthday. This means everything here is second-hand information.

First, I have to apologize to my mother. There are no pictures because Joan forgot to take the camera when she went out with Lucas and her mother. You'll have to do the same as me and just imagine.

The first thing the intrepid trio did was go shopping for some foodstuffs. In the process they got a small cake and ate it with Lucas. After shopping they went to a small park in the middle of Wuchang called Hong Shan park (literally "flood mountain park"), meeting up with Joan's cousin with whom we have a very close relationship. There he ran around and looked at everything and generally had a good time. There was some kind of "drumming for kids" display there that Lucas partook of, apparently striking his drum with great zeal (but no sense of rhythm if I know my boy). Indeed he thought it was so much fun he stole the drumstick. (Nobody noticed this last point until they were a looooooooong distance away from the park, so now he has a drumstick.)

After the park it was time for the restaurant and eating. This went as usual but for one small thing: Joan's retainers accidentally got left on the table, wrapped in tissues. She didn't know this until everybody made it home, however. She called the restaurant and asked if they'd seen them but nobody had. She had to make the long trip back to the restaurant and then root around in the (dry) garbage until, just shortly before she was about to give up, she found them. Some extreme cleaning measures later she has a pair of retainers again.

I'd like to post more, but I'm still a bit dizzy so this is it for today.

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.

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.

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.

Six months is long enough, isn't it?

So, I've been incredibly lazy and demotivated in the last six months. As is typical for China (and, indeed, anywhere) I've been hit with the "no good deed goes unpunished" thing this year and had, thereby, my life sucked out of me. I could rant for a while on this subject, but I think it's better, given the catching up I have to do, to just give you the executive summary: three of the foreign teachers at the main campus of WUISS did such a good job and were so popular with the students that in punishment for this we were sent to the Sweathogs campus (a.k.a. "The East Lake Campus of Wuhan University International Software School, a business division of Wuhan University"). So instead of having 14 hours per week with students that were an active joy to teach, I got, last term, only six hours with students of that calibre and 10 hours with the Sweathogs. (Yes, they increased my teaching hours by two so I could have more exposre to these dullards!) These students, in particular my early Friday class, are so worthless—not just as students but in many cases as human beings—that I just found myself not wanting to think about things.

Added into this was the increasing stress of my imminent fatherhood. Joan, as can be seen in the picture next to this paragraph, was increasingly obviously going to be changing my life still further with a bouncing baby basketball child of some indeterminate gender (you're not allowed to know this in advance in China and Joan didn't want to spend the money it would take to get the answer through bribery). The nervousness I felt around this I couldn't let show because Joan was already nervous enough for about fifteen people. I instead kept it bottled inside and pretended to not be worried.

Joan, in retrospect, is a pretty incredible girl. Where most women in China won't work for three months before giving birth, Joan was working literally up to the night before the exciting series of hospital visits leading to final delivery of our child. Those hospital visits in themselves were nerve-wracking—we went three times with false labour before we finally got the real thing—and in retrospect I'm very happy that the school completely screwed up in organizing a special class (it was to have started on the 7th of January but actually started on the 14th) because I'd have been useless in the classroom while all that was going on. As it was, I didn't feel particularly useful, but at least I could be there a little bit.

(I had to keep rushing home, you see, on the off chance the school gave me the information I needed for my classes so I could plan. In the end I had three days' notice to plan for a 14-day—uninterrupted!—course where I taught over four terms of English in two weeks to a single class. Three. Days'. Notice.)

Anyway, by now anybody who actually bothers to read this blog already knows that on the 9th of January, at 12:40AM, in the city of Wuhan, Lucas Richter (a.k.a. 王森鋭 – Wang Senrui) was born to two loving, exhausted and emotionally drained parents. It was a difficult delivery, made even more difficult by the fact that he weighed 4.35kg (9.57 pounds) that finally led to delivery by caesarian section. Still, it's all over now and Joan is recovering nicely from the surgery, albeit getting a wee bit cranky at our child. (Ironically I have more experience with babies than Joan seeing as I was babysitting at about the same time she was born....)

Lucas is, as of yesterday, one month old and has already wrought massive changes to our life. Now of course some of this is because of the horrific weather we've been having—China is experiencing the worst winter in living memory right now, but I'll be saying more on that later, complete with pictures—which has crammed us all, effectively, into the only heated room in the apartment. (I have a small space heater in the office, so I can do work there, but it's not very comfortable.) This crazy weather is beginning to let up, but we're still all stuck in that one room complete with jury-rigged bed extension for Joan's mother to sleep on. Still, all that aside, Lucas is now the master of our household. When he wants to eat, he eats (or our ears bleed – our choice). When he wants to sleep (which isn't often enough...) he sleeps. And, of course, when he decides that he wants to sleep on a person, not on a pile of blankets so soft it would embarrass a cloud? He sleeps on a person. (The choice, again, is that or our eardrums bleed.)

On the whole, though, to be fair to the little tyke, he's been good. I've babysat for kids far more prone to squalling and I've heard the horror stories of not getting any sleep at night because that's when the baby is active. Lucas sleeps through most of the night without fussing, waking up only at midnight and, typically, 5AM for feeding. A minor adjustment to my sleep/wake cycle will account for those late night feedings without me getting too wiped out by lack of sleep.

Lucas, at this point, according to everybody, looks a lot like me. (This will, of course, change and already has.) He's a big-'un and he definitely has my eye shape. His nose, to me, looks more like Joan's and his eye colour....

Well, people keep asking me about the colour of his eyes. I keep having to say "I don't know". It's frankly quite embarrassing, but the truth is that, despite Lucas' eyes having opened long ago (first glimpse of them was day 3 -- by now he's looking at things and actively tracking movement) I still can't really describe his eye colour. The eyes are dark. Very dark. But not dark like Chinese eyes which reach the point of almost looking black. There's a hint of blue to them. Or something. Maybe dark hazel? I have an idea. Click on the picture next to this paragraph (I took a closeup) and decide for yourself. Maybe then you can tell me what colour the eyes are.

Anyway, that's enough catching up for today. I promise that I will restart blogging with something resembling regularity so that my mother doesn't kill me. I'll also have more pictures to show next time around (it takes a while to upload these things!) including what it looks like in Wuhan when there's more than three days of snow in a winter.

Happy Birthday To Me

So, today is my birthday. I've already talked about the present I got (and the amusing way in which it was bought) in yesterday's blog entry. Today I'll talk about the birthday itself. I'll be updating this entry as the day progresses so stay tuned.

My day opens up with the best present possible: waking up next to the beautiful girl who was somehow sufficiently brain-damaged to become my wife. After that a printer is next to nothing.

I woke up long before Joan did, so I spent much of the morning watching her and listening to her snore lightly. I also experimented with moving around and watching her move after me (although this had the side effect of continually shrinking the space available to me on the bed). Finally she woke up and wished me a happy birthday. We then got up.

Joan's mother had been busy. When we got up, we were faced with the traditional birthday...

...noodles. Yes. You read that right. Birthday noodles. You were expecting cake?! Which country do you think I live in again?

In China the birthday tradition is to make a bowl of "long life noodles" -- basically a spicy noodle soup with slices of beef, vegetables, mushrooms and other things (this one had spicy sticky rice dumplings, for example)
-- and, to be strictly traditional, share it with family and neighbours. (We decided to keep it in the family, however. We're not that traditional. Our neighbours aren't Chinese and wouldn't understand the meaning of it anyway.)

That's it for the morning report. Stay tuned as I update my birthday report over the day.

Afternoon update:
Joan had to go to the dentist today to get her braces adjusted, so I was left pretty much alone all afternoon. I tinkered with my printer, mostly, figuring out how to make it do its tricks and such. I also, as an acid test, printed off an e-book I'd been wanting to get run off at a print shop for a while. The new printer is sweet: fast and yet with good quality output. This even though the Linux drivers don't support it fully.

Evening update:
My birthday dinner was delicious. Joan's mother bought some 夫妻肺片 (Lit. "Married Couple Lung Pieces" -- mysteriously named because as far as I know there's no lung pieces in it, nor any married couples), a dish consisting of sliced beef, sliced beef tripe, sliced beef blood vessels, peanuts -- all in a peppery, garlic oil sauce. Other dishes included 腐乳 (fermented "cream tofu"), a marinated tofu and pepper dish, some Chinese cabbage hearts, and fried, spicy fish.

After dinner my friend from SCUM dropped by with his girlfriend. Oh, and a new coffee maker as my birthday present, so now its time to find some decent coffee.

Night-time update:
So, I headed out for my night-time walk and fell into a mud puddle, coming home dripping wet. Fun, fun, fun. Still a decent birthday overall.