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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

The Barrie Connection and other stories.

So, tomorrow school restarts and we'll see if my conviction to blog at least once a week (holidays notwithstanding) holds true.

Last time I posted I made a cryptic reference to synchronicity and Barrie. I thought I'd expand a bit on this this time.

Many years ago, while I was in the Army Cadets (2596 Royal Canadian Dragoon Cadet Corps)—where I met Canada's current Chief of Defense Staff while he was still a lowly 2nd Lieutenant—I went to Ipperwash Army Cadet Camp over the summer and had my first real romance. That first romance was with a girl (Marie Ruddy) from Barrie, Ontario. Fast forward a few years and we come to the story I related last week about my half-sister Anne. Who lived, at the time, in Barrie Ontario. Rounding it out, I've done on-and-off searches for various classmates and friends over the years and finally, just a short time ago (as in less than two weeks before today), I tracked down one of my buddies from Lahr Senior School, Brent Kogan. Who after a stint in Winnipeg wound up running a business in Barrie, Ontario.

I wonder how many other Barrie connections I will uncover in the upcoming years?

So, enough reminiscence and back to the present. Joan bought a bicycle over the summer because she was tired of taking very inconvenient buses to get to work. (Walking to catch the bus that took her to work was basically almost half the distance to work to begin with.) That bicycle was stolen last week when she went out to Huazhong University of Science and Technology to register for her Master's program. As a result she had to get a replacement and this time chose to do what she was supposed to do in the summer: get an electric scooter. (I still don't know what made her think a bicycle was a good idea.) After five hours, 38 minutes, 25 seconds (I was counting!) and visiting at least ten different places selling these things we finally bought one. It's a cute little unit which I'll have pictures of shortly when the weather lets me take pictures that don't suck. It's a dark-ish red bike designed to hold one person Joan's size comfortably. (When I get on it it's comical how wide I have to spread my legs to be able to turn the handlebars!)

The theft of the bicycle, however, reminded me of something that's been in my thoughts for a while in reference to China: honesty. For all practical purposes it doesn't exist here. Or, rather, it exists as long as you redefine it.

As far as I can tell when someone is introduced to you in China as "honest" it means "he probably won't steal money from you". In terms of speaking the truth there seems to be very little to no honesty outside of the family unit. Lies drop from Chinese mouths like they do from fishermen or cops telling stories of their exploits. Even during the negotiations for the scooter I saw glimpses of this. Joan was not entirely enthused at the price of the unit she eventually bought (directly as a result of me telling her to buy it because she so obviously liked it!) so the price dropped by a token 100RMB to help sway her decision as "the lowest we can possibly go". Later a man bought a black version of the same model and was getting it outfitted while Joan was still dithering. She boldly approached him and asked him how much he paid for it. (Signs of mistrusting the sales staff, obviously.) He answered 2580RMB (Joan was being offered the bike for 2480). Later he came in while we were (well, Joan was) still dithering and asked quietly what we'd been offered. Without missing a beat Joan told him "the same as you".

This is a small example, of course, and not that different from what you'd get in an equivalent situation in Canada (with the exception of boldly walking up to raw strangers and asking what they bought something for, I think), but it's the proverbial thin end of the wedge. This is how absolutely everything is done in China: you say whatever the other side wants to hear to get your goals accomplished with no regard for the truth. The only place where honesty in the sense we mean it enters the vocabulary is within the family unit (as I mentioned before) where, in typical Chinese fashion, the dials are all turned to eleven and the honesty verges on the brutal.

Food for thought. I'm not sure where the thoughts will lead or what will follow from them, but it's still something to ponder I suspect.

Holiday is almost over.

Well, at least I think it's almost over. This being the Wuhan University International Software School nobody's actually bothered to tell me when my classes begin again. I'm guessing they'll begin on Monday, but undoubtedly I won't be told for sure until Sunday night or something. I think in the three years I've been here the longest lead time for information like this that I've ever received (without digging for it on my own) was three days (and that was for a 2-week intensive course with the same class every day for eight hours! – four semesters of English in two weeks).

I also decided to take a break from the blog over the official holiday, so I have a bit of catching up to do.

One of the first things of interest that happened during the holiday was a student of mine (Li Zefeng) who is one of two people at the Sweathogs Campus that has any worth as a student (and maybe one of six who have worth as human beings)—I am not exaggerating here!—dropped by for a visit. We talked a little about his future plans and goals (something I'll likely bring up in a future blog entry if I run out of family material) and he, naturally, brought gifts: a package with two tins of nice 西湖龙井茶 (West Lake Dragon Well tea—an internationally famed tea), a bag of coconut candies which Joan promptly hid from me and now doles out in small doses and a box of dried black wood ears (a kind of edible fungus, and a tasty kind to boot, but I think they're also considered medicinal). In return for this I gave him some software that will assist him in building the skills that he's not getting at his phony school.

The family did a few visits during this time, but as it's always awkward when I go visit because of the intrinsic clash of the communication barrier vs. the natural Chinese desire to be a good host, I stayed behind most days. Sadly this included a day when Joan and her mother were supposed to be buying a house-warming present for her uncle but she instead went to visit a park with Lucas for most of the day. I have pictures from this that I will be sorting through and uploading for Sunday's returned regular update so hold on for a bit. (Hint: Lucas does his incredibly cute routine again.)

Ah, what the Hell! I'll do that right now!

OK, I'm back. Here are some selected photos of Lucas at the park:

From Lucas

The last interesting thing to happen to me over this holiday was hearing from my half-sister Anne again. "Half-sister?" the two of you who don't already know the story are asking. "What are you talking about?" Let's get into the wayback machine to give some context.

Back when I was 30 years old and living in Ottawa writing software for Pronexus, I got the most surreal telephone call of my life. My mother called up and started saying things that I thought, at first, were a joke. There were only two problems with this theory: this kind of joke is something more that my father would have done (my mother has no discernible sense of humour!), and there was no punchline. The basic story was that six years before I was born my mother had a baby daughter out of wedlock and had immediately put her up for adoption. I won't get into the gory details of all this, but the practical upshot of it all was that I was told at 30 that I had a half-sister six years older than me.

As it so happens, I was the closest person to my newly-(re)surfaced half-sister. I got in touch with her by telephone and then drove my way from Ottawa to Barrie (which reminds me that there's an awful lot of odd synchronicity between me and Barrie) to meet her as the first representative of the family. The meeting went OK, she then went on to visit my mother, the two corresponded for a while.

Then she dropped off the planet.

Now, many years later, my mother asks me if it's OK for "Anne" to get in touch with me. I had by this time almost completely forgotten about this Anne and thought it was weird for her to ask me if my cousin Anne could get in touch with me. (Thought running through my head was "well, duh!") So I told her that there are only two people in the family I didn't want to ever hear from and one of them wasn't even in the family anymore. The rest were more than welcome. Then I found out it was half-sister Anne my mother was speaking about. (Not that this changes anything. There is still only one current family member I don't want to hear from.)

It was interesting to hear that Anne had contacted the rest of the family once again, so I of course looked forward to her email. I almost missed it, however, because changes in Anne's life involved a change in her name. I was looking for an email from Anne Crannie and instead got an email with a subject that looked like it came straight out of a spam artist's from an Anne Howat. For days it sat in my inbox because I was taking it easy for the holidays and didn't really want to wrestle with spam settings and the like, so it took me a while to find out that this was half-sister Anne. Once I did read it, however, of course I rattled off a reply (largely incoherent) and a pointer to this blog.

Thus stands the state of the family. And now that I've had my Spring Festival hiatus, I'll be posting every Sunday(ish) again.

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.

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.

---

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.

And another blogger in the family

Joan has a blog because I forced her to start one at gunpoint (or so she'll claim if asked). Pop on over and have a look. You'll have to have a font that displays Chinese to read the stuff that Joan didn't write herself, I'm afraid to report.

Announcing the family's newest blogger!

I said I would announce the family's newest blogger and I'm a man of my word. Without further ado (or adon't, for that matter), here is...

My mother's blog.

Yeah, I know. Not the announcement that was expected after the last blog entry, but Joan still hasn't come around to the idea of blogging yet. Now that my mother has one, though, she's going to make one of her own.

Catching up.

It's been a long time since I've posted here. I have a good excuse, however: I'm a lazy bastard.

Now in my defence, since the last time I posted I did my exams (a brain-melting activity), calculated marks (an exercise in creative justifications) and then started working on my project with Jeff full time. These all interfered with my mental energy in writing blog entries. Too, I'm back to my old trouble: the things I write about are, to me, after six years in this country, everyday and commonplace. It's hard for me to believe that any of this could be even slightly interesting. Still, my mother has not-so-subtly hinted...

Joan, my little mother-to-be, is progressing well in pregnancy. Everything is going according to The List I was given (a list from an experienced father of what to expect as the mother goes through the assorted physical, mental and emotional changes of pregnancy). I'm not going into details, but just rest assured that it's all according to The List.

One problem Joan faces (and, therefore, so do I) is that she has nothing that takes up her time. She's never learnt how to handle free time. In her whole life she's never had any. She's been invariably studying or working (or, more often, both). This interacts very badly with so-called "morning sickness". (Why is it called this? Because calling it "twenty-four-by-seven nausea" is bad salesmanship....) A typical day after she stopped working basically consisted of Joan sitting around the home, sleeping, disturbing me at my work and complaining about an upset stomach.

We found a cure for this, however, on Sunday. An old friend from my previous school invited us out to where he lives over the summer. (Basically a palatial house rented by a foreign engineer in the middle of one of Wuhan's largest parks.) Joan likes Robert (the friend in question), likes Xin Xia (Robert's girlfriend) and was really looking forward to the visit. The visit was amiable, fun and wound up, as most visits here do, in a restaurant for supper, together with our hostess (the Australian wife of the Dutch engineer who rents the palace). Joan ate, drank, chatted and generally had a good time -- and to both our surprise she didn't get sick. She had an appetite, and then didn't chuck it back up afterwards.

This sealed it for me. Joan's going to have to find a hobby or something to do during the day so she's not dwelling on her morning sickness. When she's occupied she is happy, perky, cheerful and not at all sick. When she's left to her own devices her life is miserable. I don't like seeing her miserable.

One suggestion (thanks, Mom!) that I've received is for Joan to start a blog of her own. I'm trying now to gently coax her to that idea, so hopefully it happens. If it does, I'll announce my family's newest blogger with great fanfare right here.

But Mom? Turnabout is fair play. I have no idea what's going on in your life. Maybe it's time for you and Andy to start a small blog?...

Baby pictures are in!

Not much to say here. Just click on the photo to the right and look at my child through the glorious wonders of ... black and white ... something.

"Summer... turns me upside down."

Free cookies (nice salty ones with chives in them -- I'm in China, remember!) to anybody who can figure out where the title comes from.

So summer is officially approaching. Technically I'm still in spring here, but I find it difficult to refer to 33°C@80%+ as "spring". Still, this is approaching the end of my sixth year in China, so I'm getting used to the heat. I'm not even using the air conditioner yet. I've partially adapted, it seems.

Maybe the massive weight loss has something to do with it?

Anyway, with summer comes all sorts of other fun things besides heat and humidity. As usual these things come in two forms: the good and the bad. Maybe that should be "the good, the bad and the ugly". Only I'm in China. Let's modify this to "the good, the bad and the positively weird".

Let's look first at the good:

• As the temperatures rise, the clothing gets skimpier and skimpier. Yes, I'm married, but this doesn't mean I'm dead! Watching the cute local girls wander around in clothing that would make a By Ward Market streetwalker gasp in shame (without the cynical, self-consciousness you'd find in said streetwalkers) is a good way to take my mind off of the searing heat.
• The city explodes with greenery and flowers. A city that in the winter is the epitome of dingy industrial cities, grey and lifeless, suddenly sprouts green everywhere. The underlying acrid scent of pollution that permeates everything is masked very effectively by a bewildering variety of sweetly-scented flowers. They're even nice on the eyes—almost, but not quite, matching the scantily-clad girls.
• A lot of my favourite foods here are summertime foods: especially the cold noodle(-like) dishes. These are coming to the table more and more often.

OK. That's pretty much it for the good. Now let's talk about the bad:

• There is, of course, the searing heat. Today it was "only" 33°C. It's been warmer already—today was actually a bit of a relief—and it's going to get worse and worse. I've seen as high as 42°C with humidity well in excess of 70%.
• The growth of all this greenery includes some plants (which I have yet to identify) which drive my nose nuts. This starts in early spring, goes away for a while, restarts around this time of year, disappears in early summer, then comes back at the tail end of summer. Every year for the past six I've lived through this and I hate it. I was allergic to nothing in Canada. It was a bit of a shock to find out how the allergy-plagued people live, let me tell you!
• One word: mosquitoes. This place is a positive paradise for those little blood-sucking vermin. They invade everything. They'll even fly to the 20th story of skyscrapers and plague people. They're merciless and they're beyond counting. If you spend an evening killing them and managed to destroy 20, you can rest assured that there's dozens more hiding where you can't find them ready to come out at you when you're no longer looking for them.

Now it's time for the positively weird:

• First on the weird list is the sheets I sleep on. If you click on the image to the right you'll notice something odd on the side of the bed farthest from the camera. It looks like the bed is covered with little pieces of wood, right? Well, it's not wood. It's bamboo. And it's hundreds of little pieces (slightly smaller in area than a Mah-jong tile) threaded together with fishing line and edged with stretchy rubber stuff. It keeps you cool in the heat. It sounds ridiculous and uncomfortable, but it is neither. It really works and it is actually quite comfortable. (The more hirsute among us have to wear light underclothes to bed, however, to avoid some truly painful moments.)
• The second weird thing is probably leaping out at you in that picture while I babbled on about the sheets. Notice that funny dome over the bed? It's a tent. There is a tent over my bed. It is mesh on all sides, including the bottom. It zips up tight allowing nothing to get in. Since Joan is pregnant now she doesn't want us to light mosquito coils at night (what we used to do to keep mosquitoes from eating us alive). So instead we bought a tent to put on the bed. I was a bit sceptical at first, but it does work well. I even (mostly) fit!
• The final weird thing is the bedding again. Ignore the covered half of the bed. For Joan the weather is still too cool for the bamboo sheets, you see, so we've folded a quilt for her side of the bed. Back over on the bamboo side, look at the odd pillow. It's made of woven grass on the side you can see. The other side is thin strips of bamboo. The filling is buckwheat husks. (It was once scented with chrysanthemum blooms, but those have long since faded away.) This is the pillow you use to keep your head cool at night. The side I have up now is suited to moderate heat. The other side is stiffer (and takes a lot of getting used to!) but is very suitable for the blazing heat later in the summer. Of course by that time I'll be firing up the air conditioner, so that side of the pillow will rarely see action. But it's there for the inevitable days where the power company decides to just shut down the electricity without warning. (Let's hope they at least pick a windy day for that!)

So, that was my little taste of China for this post. Hope you enjoyed it.