Why I never will need to go to Vegas

More shots from Macao. The south edge of the main island is fringed with hotels and casinos, which I got to explore because I needed a free wi-fi source to make calls and get more money sent for my visa. (Which I ended up getting, by the way) Course, I could have just played some Baccarat and won millions, but that would have blown my cover...










The casinos seem to be fairly Vegas on the outside, but the schwag inside tends more towards China...





What's Macao got that Vegas ain't got? This, for starters. Which is where I did most of my exploring, once I figured out a way to get my cash card to work...

Getting to work

One good way to restart a narrative, at least if I remember the writing classes that I took a long while back, is to start with the setting. And what better setting than our walk to school every weekday?


Yes, I know it's terribly cliched to start with your main character wake up and look out the window. So sue me. Besides, this picture represents a special occasion. See those buildings under construction way off in the background? Not usually visible. Ditto on the sunlight and shadows.

Fast forward a bit, and it's out the door, around the corner, and up the street for a fifteen minute walk to school.

 

You'll note the seasonal variation in the photos, which are a compilation of the relatively rare times when A) I've had my camera with me, and B) the bright morning sunlight (fairly rare) has inspired me to take a few pictures.

 

 


Most days, we see Hat Man somewhere along the way. He's very distinguished, with a neatly trimmed grey mustache. That's him with the black overcoat.


Then it's past the abandoned commercial building of some kind ... (snarling barking Doberman not pictured)


...past the breakfast cart...


...and the entrance to the girls' boarding school. (Said girls, who tend to travel in clumps and screech in delight whenever they see a "cute!!" little foreigner, being the bane of my childrens' existance..) 


Xander and Zekey on the final stretch.


And here we are! The bell rings in another ten minutes, so finish your breakfast and get to your classroom.

Realizing some goals, beginning others...

I'm probably breaking confidence a bit as a dad, but here is part of my son's collection that I found the other day while cleaning up around the house. Before he left for the States, Xander had taken a plastic apple-shaped pencil holder and filled it with scraps of paper, each of which had an important life goal written on it. Here are a few:

• Get in world record
• Good life
• Nice Family
• Ride 1st class plane seat
• 100 元 (Yuan - the Chinese currency)

Hard to believe, but he and I left for the US on July 18 - almost four months ago.  I haven't been posting about his story much on this blog, but today, some good news - he had successful surgery to remove the pins and external fixators that were holding his bones in place as they healed.  That means a green light to travel China, so Jane and Xander will be flying back early next week!  To say that there is much relief at the whole thing being over is a bit of an understatement...

How to Be Alone

As we know, we humans are generally social creatures, deriving a large portion of our happiness from interaction with others of our kind.  However, we are also by definition individuals, who obtain our identity from within.  Thus is born the continuum between extrovert on one hand and introvert on the other.  For some strange reason, we are, generally speaking, much more comfortable with the first end of this scale than the second.

Take this weekend, for example.  A fine weekend indeed, and spent almost entirely at home with Zekey and Ysa.  Highlights included finishing up a short video that I'd been working on, reading a bit, making black bean chili, editing some photographs, and chatting with Jane and a few friends in the States on Facebook and Skype.  The kids played inside most of the day Saturday, half by themselves, and half with a (very loud) young friend who came over for a three hour long match of... Jedi knights?  Ultraman?  In any case, something involving a lot of swords and yelling, in (to me) nearly incomprehensible Chinese.

Sunday, more of the same in the morning, followed by an afternoon following the kids on their bikes as we went first to the exercise park (a small plaza fitted with generically dangerous clunky metal workout equipment that passes for our playground) and then to the paved lot in front of the elementary school, where I watched the kids interact with a streaming succession of friends, older schoolmates, friends' parents, giggling college girls trying to get them to pose for pictures on their cell phones, gaping grandparents who had never seen a foreigner before - still! after us being here for two years!! - trying to push their two year olds into playing with Ysa, who now knows how to deal with such behavior by a simple humph! and a turning away that is just charming enough not to be offensive...

Aaanyway, my point in all this is that, through all this, I don't think I had a face to face interaction with an adult that lasted more than ten minutes.  And was fine about it.  (Notice the obligatory disclaimer.  You see what I mean about us humans feeling much less comfortable with the introverted end of the spectrum, right?) 

All of this a long, round-about intro to this video, which, now that I've gone on for a while, really speaks for itself:



A good reminder that no matter where we travel, the most comfortable, and the most challenging place to live is inside your own skin.

Back in the swing of things

Image:  National Day holiday travelers in the North Train Station plaza, Chengdu

A quick Sunday update to all, as the students stream back from almost a week off of classes from the National Day break.  Jane and Xander are still in the States, return date still not fixed, but now estimated to be late October or early November.  Ysa, Zekey, and I had a pleasant, if relatively non-eventful week off, mostly at home, with visits to our friends the Gaos and their farm, and several other gatherings with classmates and neighbors. 

The October weather, aside from a couple of gloriously clear days caused by factory shutdowns and the general lack of car emissions over the National Day Holiday, has been its typical lead sky overcast, with just a hint of nippiness in the air.  I'm realizing more and more just how solar powered I am, and I'm getting good at figuring out my mood lately.  Annoyed at the kids?  Weather related.  Not feeling like doing much? Weather related. General blahs?  Weather related. 

The good news?  Anything weather related usually disappears soon after diagnosis.  Or a strong green tea caffeine fix, whichever comes first.  And spicy food.  Oh, and as a further preventative, I've taken to burning incense, and lighting lots of candles at night to compensate for deficiencies in the red end of the spectrum outdoors.

Waitaminnit...  Green tea?  Spicy food?  Incense and candles?  Lots of red?  Hmmm, sounds familiar, but just can't place it....



Oh, yeah, right.  So culture is influenced by environmental factors!  Whattya know?  (Jane, don't be surprised if our apartment resembles a Taoist temple by the time you get back...)

I've got to stop watching documentaries right before going to bed...

I woke up this morning in the middle of a lucid dream where I was part of a documentary crew assigned to follow Jesus on a peacemaking tour among the gangs of South Central L.A.  (Apparently, He's still a very good negotiator in such matters.)  I was puled from the camera crew at the last minute because the main gang that we were following had just registered their name as a registered trademark, and the producers of the documentary were worried that the gang might sue us for copyright infringement if we accidentally caught Jesus mentioning the name of the gang on camera.

(No, I don't usually post my dreams to Anywhere, but this one seemed very apropos of, well, something, anyway.   Not to be sacrilegious or anything, but isn't there a rule that states that when Jesus appears to you in a lucid dream, you have to share it on some form of social media?  Think it's in the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew somewhere - I'll have to look it up to be sure...)

Look, Honey, it's our friends the Mangosteens!

...and the Rambutans, and the Dragonfruits....why all sorts of our friends from China and Southeast Asia are here!  What are you all doing in Canada?



Seems like I took these photos in Toronto's Chinatown back during a visit there in the summer of 2008 - right about the time when we were considering a volunteer position open in Egypt.  That would have been interesting, would it not? 

(Spoiler alert:  The Egypt thing didn't work out.)



Now that I look at the photos, I do remember thinking "What the heck are these strange mutant things?", and we talked to a Chinese guy who was really excited to find what I now know are longans (the little brown ones in the photo above), which didn't make it to Toronto that often, apparently. 

 

Wow, a sign that our whole Asian adventure was predestined after all! 

Or, more likely, a sign that I've always been attracted to strange-looking tropical fruit...

15,790. And shrinking.

What is 15,790?  Why, the number of digital photos on our laptop's hard drive, of course.  That's 28.8 gigabytes of pixelly goodness, or over one third of this old Macbook's available storage space.  It's hard to believe that 80 GB was more memory than we could use when we bought this thing five years ago- now I feel like we've got the computer equivalent of the house with twelve cats and rooms full of stacks of old newspapers. It doesn't help matters much that the hard drive is now making a sound that sounds like a mix between an 1956 Vespa scooter in dire need of a tuneup, a foot-powered dentist drill, and, well, a MacBook hard drive that may fail at any minute.



Or maybe that will get better once I install the latest two direly needed software updates.  I've heard that can sometimes be the case.  (Please be the case, please be the case...)  Oh, but I need more space on my hard drive to install said updates, so back to the 15,970 photos that I'm in the process of weeding out.  I mean, Lordy, 15,970 photos?? I don't know why anyone in their right mind would have more than 13, 476...



This all just to say that several forces in the universe, chiefly being my need to delete a couple of thousand photos or so (don't worry, they're backed up onto the external drive), but also including the fact that my camera is in the United States right now, have conspired to send me back in time to re-examine the far distant past of 2010.  And wow, nothing like a year or so gone by to give you a fresh eye on your photos.  And Jane's photos, I might add.  The picture at the top of the post is hers, as is the one below, and several more on the way.



So yeah, I've been cropping like a Banshee, and sending all the results to Flickr.  Which is why you may see a few more things that are out of sequence coming up, but, you're not expecting chronology from me anyway, right?

Oh, and yes, you heard correctly:  Banshees crop their photographs.  All the time.  It's what they do when they're not screaming.

Henri Cartier-Bresson?  Not a Banshee.

For the first time in TWO WHOLE YEARS!!

I had a couple of robo-posts on the blog last week while I was in Chicago, but this is the first time that I've posted on this blog from the United States in two years. Correction - this is the first time I've posted from the States in TWO WHOLE YEARS!! (That extra exclamation point at the end makes all the difference, don't you think?)

To start out, then, a partial list of things that I've done in the last week or so, for the first time in TWO WHOLE YEARS!!

I've:
- driven a car (several, in fact, thanks to the generosity of friends)
- eaten homemade cherry pie ala mode, salad with Ranch dressing, and Costa Rican veggie burrito with awesome grilled mushrooms
- gotten onto Facebook without having to connect to a VPN
- paid more for a bagel sandwich than it usually costs to take our whole family out to dinner back in China
- and, most importantly, been able to reconnect with many friends that I haven't seen in (all together, now!) TWO WHOLE YEARS!!

As I think I mentioned, we're here for my son's surgery, (now underway!), and one of the reasons I can write this while waiting instead of pacing up and down the waiting room like a caged ferret is the support that we've been getting from everyone. Thanks, all! Great to be back.


The first time I've seen Mt. Ranier from an airplane window in TWO WHOLE YEARS!! (okay, the first time ever, but that doesn't sound as good)

The big news!

About a month ago now, we found out that Xander will need fairly major surgery within the next year to correct some bone growth issues in his forearms. (One of the other big reasons this blog was silent for a bit recently...) After many many calls back and forth, and many many people who have been invaluable in helping us in so many ways, we got confirmation that he is covered to have the surgery at Shriner's Hospital in Philadelphia at the end of July. Nervewracking, but good news, indeed.


We weren't actually in this department ever, but ya gotta love China sometimes for telling it like it is...

And just a couple of days ago, we got our plane tickets booked, so it looks like we're doing this, doesn't it? We'll be in Chicago for a bit to get acclimated, then on to Philadelphia for the surgery, then recovery after that. There will be a tricky shuffle as Jane comes out with Zekey and Ysa for a couple of weeks, then I go back with Z and Y at the beginning of September to start the school year, while Jane stays in the US with Xander until he gets the green light to travel back to China. (Although arranging all of this via email, and Skype calls back and forth has made it all seem very virtual indeed..)

So the upshot of all this is that Xander and I will be in the States for most of this summer. Starting in just a bit more than two weeks! I don't know what I'll end up writing on the blog coming up in the next couple of months, though I'm guessing that I'll keep more of the personal hospital-related news over on Facebook for those that know us. I've got a big backlog of China related news and interesting links to keep me busy posting, that's for sure. Or maybe you'll get a lot of links to YouTube videos and pictures of cats with funny sayings underneath. Or I might save my energy and not post at all until the fall, who knows? (Though this doesn't mean I don't like you. I do, really and truly!)

Ordinary Stuff - Mmmm, Cherries...

It's cherry (and mulberry and waxberry) season here in Sichuan...



Hmmm, where have I seen these before...?



Thanks, China, for providing a flashback to a game that I loved when I was... three? four? and haven't thought about since. Take that, Marcel Proust!

Get to Work, You!

Spent a Sunday afternoon doing a few things on the computer, a little tidying up, and... what, exactly? And now it's time to wrangle something for dinner. Looks like any other profound insights on life will have to wait till tomorrow, but I did want to share this robot picture with all of you...

Christmas time's a comin'...

...though this photo might explain why it's a teeny bit harder to get into the Christmas spirit here. Foggy, damp, and quite chilly in the morning, though sometimes the sun burns through by mid-afternoon. Though you might get the impression from the blog that I've been around all the while, most of what you've been reading lately was (gasp!) posted in advance, back in early December when I had a bit more time.

I've been out of town the last two weekends. First, on more a business trip to the town of Guang'an in Eastern Sichuan, where I got a chance to observe a few projects that my organization, MCC, is sponsoring there, in order to write about them for our American and Canadian publications in the next couple of months. Then, last weekend, a winter retreat for all of us to Beijing, which meant a chance to get together with colleagues, share thoughts and inspiration, and yes, even a quick afternoon trip to the Great Wall. Both short trips were eventful in their own ways, and you may hear more if time permits.

In the meantime, I'm wrapping up finals in all of my classes, filling out rubrics and plowing through student notebooks. The big news is that we're also preparing for a big trip - to Indonesia and Thailand! Thailand, because that's where our organization holds its winter training sessions, and Indonesia because we have the chance to visit some MCC friends there as well. All lots of work and disruptions to our routines, balanced out, of course, by the fact that we are incredibly fortunate to be able to do what we're doing.

Oh, and then Christmas is coming up in the midst of all this. So yeah, things have been a bit busy as of late. Because we'll be traveling, we're not going huge on the presents this year, but we want to make sure we don't ignore Christmas, either. I've been reading Dr. Suess's How the Grinch Stole Christmas to a couple of my classes that have finished with their finals, which, in addition to the pleasure of reading the phrase "Cindy-Lou Who, who was no more than two" to my students, has been a gentle reminder to not get too Grinchy myself...

Just in case I haven't introduced myself yet...

Think that says it. Photo of a storefront on Chunxi Lu, Chengdu.

Updating the ol' Resume

Recently, because we've had several new teachers joining our organization, we've had quite a few "getting to know you" introductory emails flying back and forth through cyberspace. And because I was putting off something or other at that moment, my introductory email became an exploration of the nether reaches of my work history - i.e., the jobs that usually don't make it onto my resume. (Having a Master of Fine Arts in painting means that I've occasionally had to look in some interesting places for employment...)

So, in the spirit of "Hey, I wasted my time on this - why not waste yours as well?", I thought I'd copy and paste a few of my most memorable jobs (and "jobs") onto the web site. Here goes...

- Cashier and soft drink fetcher, (age 12), Hardee's booth, Kansas State Fair (yes, my very first paid gig)

- Summer Camp Counselor, Presbyterian Clearwater Forest Camp, Brainerd, MN (You ain't really lived until you've had to deal with a cabin of fifteen hyper fourth graders making fake farting sounds for two hours after lights out...)

- Cucumber Sorter, Gundelsheimer GurkenFabrik A.G., Gundelsheim, Germany (If standing at a conveyor belt at a pickle factory picking out rotten cucumbers all day doesn't sound like much fun, it's because it isn't. Three weeks' work paid for a summer of backpacking through Europe, though.)

- Archeological Survey Assistant, Santa Fe National Forest, Coyote, New Mexico. (A summer spent following a compass through the wilderness looking for small flakes of obsidian. Oh, and stuffing myself with green chili burritos over the weekends. Ain't volunteer jobs great?)

- Stir-Fry cook, LeeAnn Chin's Carryout Chinese Cuisine, St. Paul, MN (the beginning of my long road to China? Um, probably not. I couldn't even touch an eggroll for years after that job...)

- Collections Management Intern, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. (where I got to spend many happy hours wandering alone behind the scenes in museum storage. Think the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you can get some idea.)

- File Clerk, Radiology Department, Northwestern Memorial Hospital (Filing CAT scans and shootin' the breeze with great Loud Women from the South Side, all with James Brown blasting in the background. One of the better temp jobs that I've had.)

- Temporary Front Desk Reception Relief, Leo Burnett, Chicago (Answering phones for a rotating schedule of annoyed secretaries while they had their lunch breaks at one of the biggest and most high-stress ad agencies in the country. One of the worst temp jobs that I've had. Fortunately, it only lasted two days.)

- Cloth Diaperer. Having successfully shepherded three kids along from birth to potty training without the help of disposables means that I've got six years of experience in the field - enough for another master's degree, I think. (Jane, of course, is a postdoctoral fellow in the field...)

So yeah, that's my resume, more or less ...
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Do I get the job? Oh, you'll call me...
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Okay, well, uh, look forward to hearing more from you...