Let it snow
Ah, what a wonderful day. The temperature was climbing, heading towards the 90s, and what are we doing? Why my wife and sister-in-law were busy making our turkey dinner. Yes, since we had missed our traditional Christmas, we had planned on celebrating Christmas in July. So earlier this week we cut down a tree (one of the benefits of having your own personal tree farm is that you're not tied down to society's calendar), set it up and decorated it. Christmas carols have been wafting from the stereo. Little presents have been purchased, wrapped and placed with care under the tree. And today was the big day. They started the big dinner baking in the morning and a bit after noon we sat down to turkey, mashed potatoes, all sorts of veggies and salads. Afterwards we napped. Then we sang some Christmas carols and finished up by eating the dessert we had no room for earlier.
Of course, it was a bit lacking. Instead of nice snuggly sweaters we were wearing shorts and short sleeved shirts. And of course, none of the churches in the area were having Christmas services. Still it feels like a holiday and it was a nice little time for family. Plus we have just as many leftovers as we would have had in December....
And for my next trick...
Dare I report this incident? Well, hopefully my mom will be too busy packing for her flight tomorrow that she won't check the weblog.
So, I went to my former place of employment yesterday to say hello and see what was new with my former co-workers. It was a hot day yesterday, though nothing like they've been having back east. I was driving my mother-in-law's car, and I hadn't bother to roll down all the windows. Having only the driver's window open makes for funky airflow that I find distracting, so I had that one rolled halfway up and the vent fans blowing. It was hot, but nothing too distressing. At least I thought. Anyway, I manage to remember the proper exit and arrive at work. I park my car and head towards the front door. As I approach, a couple of my former coworkers step out. They are quite happy to see me and give me a warm welcome. We stand outside the door chatting a bit and suddenly I start to feel a bit dizzy. I think to myself that we should go inside where I can sit down or at least lean against something. I start to move forward and then everything goes gray. I have this moment of delirium and the next thing I know I'm on my knees and my former boss is helping me stand up and go through the door. Apparently I had slumped down and then fell backwards. When my friends tried to help me up, I guess they must have gotten me on my feet again but then I collapsed again, this time onto my knees. This called quite a bit of consternation and they ended up calling the paramedics, just to be safe. So there I was, sitting in the company lobby, my feet up and an ice pack on my head. My boss gives me a bottle of water, then the person at 911 says not to give me water, so they take the bottle away. People are coming up and greeting me, while I sit there like some head of state or something. Soon we can hear the sirens in the distance. Despite the fact that I'm egotistical enough to keep a blog, I really don't like attracting
that much attention.
Anyway, the medics checked me out and couldn't find anything wrong. Once I had sat down and started cooling off I was feeling fine. So we all wrote it off to overheating and I continued my visit. It was the last day for another of my erstwhile coworkers, so I got to attend the goodbye party and probably see more folks than if I had wandered the building on my own. I was even given a piece of cheesecake and a side of raspberries. Of course, I don't
like cheesecake and raspberries, or at least I didn't, but given all the fuss folks had made over me, I felt obliged to eat it and build up my strength and all that. Turns out that it wasn't that bad, really. I think that all that Yunnan
lao jao has burned away my finicky taste buds and now I can eat anything.
Access denied
One of my tasks this summer is to make some upgrades to our computer. One thing I did was to get an Airport card so that we can use wireless internet. Of course, all I did was buy the card for the computer. I didn't set up a wireless network in my mother-in-law's house or anything. So after I installed the card and confirmed that the computer recognized it, I was kind of stuck. There was no way to test whether it would actually connect or anything. Anyway, yesterday I finally headed over to a branch of the Pierce County Library in an attempt to use their WiFi service to surf the net. It was incredibly easy and I happily clicked on my Flickr bookmark so I could upload some pix. (Although the dial-up from Mom's works great, it's still dial up and hogs the phone line.) Alas and alack, I found that Flickr was blocked. As was Blogger. The only "work" that I could end up doing on that fast and easy wireless connection was update some of my system software. Turns out that in compliance with some Child Internet protection act or some such, Pierce County Libraries limit which sites you can access. Wow, just like China.
I had mixed feelings about it all. I mean, I have no problem with the idea of keeping kids from logging onto sites with unsuitable content. Nor do I feel that the library is obligated to provide every bit of information that's out there. I'm content to let the librarians pick and choose what books, CDs, et al that they put on the shelves. But it does seems odd that I can't access some thought provoking blogs on Blogger or Live Journal with the library's connection, but I can access Sluggy Freelance. (Not that there's any reason to block Sluggy.) Of course, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about this if I hadn't been blocked from my sites. So I suppose I should have just paid for some proper web space that wouldn't offend the big bad internet filters that are out there. But if I did that, of course, I couldn't have afforded that Airport card in the first place...
While strolling through the park
This past weekend we got to catch our favorite band,
Balkanarama, at an arts festival in Kirkland. Attending a fair or festival was not on our agenda for this summer, but we really wanted to get their latest CD and they weren't scheduled at
Georgia's this month. The festival was a bit interesting. I wasn't really psyched for it, so browsing the booths wasn't as fun as it has been at past festivals. I couldn't help but compare them with the street fair that we encountered in Yunnan. The Kirkland booths were so clean and tidy and, well, bland. It seemed like every booth was using the same white canopy. Back "home" the canopies were more colorful. Not colorful in the exotic-ethnic-design sort of sense but colorful in the this-patterned-sheet-was-on-sale sort of sense. Yunnan hucksters also pack a lot more merchandise into their booths. (Well, heck, China itself is overall more compact than the States.)
Anyway, we got to the park early enough to browse the booths and then settled down to catch the show. The band was great, as usual, despite the fact that Amir had left the band and Matty was elsewhere. The crowd seemed rather sparse, and one brave soul got up and started line dancing. I thought to join him, being emboldened by my months of dancing with the Yunnan street dancers, but when it comes to dancing, I'm still very much a follower. I waited for Yau Neih to get up and join him. She did on the second number. Afterwards, she explained that she didn't know the dance he was doing for the first number, so she refrained from joining him and looking foolish. Now me, I think I'm closer to getting over that hump. If I waited until I knew the dance, I'd never get off my duff. In fact, I'd like to get a T-shirt that says, "I'm a horrible dancer and I'm up here--what's your excuse?" Anyway, dancing was fun though I was a klutz. A few months back I was grumbling to myself about the Chinese (or Wa or whatever minority group they come from) dances. They have an annoying habit of going forward some steps and then stopping or backing up. I thought it was an odd Asian thing, but the Balkan dances were doing the same darn thing! What's the matter with going forward? We never had pauses in the square dance classes we had back in school. Ah, well, it was fun just the same. In fact, I even stayed in the line when Yau Neih sat out a couple.
After the set we said thank you to the band (well, lead singer Eva Moon anyway) and grabbed some lunch. The set was from noon until 1:30 so we were all hungry. I actually had a hankering for some fried rice, but it seemed that the Germans had cornered the food court. There were
two sausage tents, with no rice or noodles in sight. (Guess the booths weren't the only thing that was all white.) But being a flexible and adaptable kind of guy I managed to enjoy a hot dog and curly fries just the same. (Though we still haven't adapted to U.S. portions. We bought two orders of fries for three people, stuffed ourselves, and still brought home some leftovers.) We gobbled down most of our meal and then went over to watch a street performance by our favorite band,
Quichua Mashis*. About three o'clock we headed home, bloated and poorer. All in all, the day was like a mini-Folklife or Puyallup Fair.
__________
* Joke lifted from our favorite band,
The Toucans
Hobbes?
One of the perqs of living overseas is getting junk mail from the U.S. Embassy. We just got an e-mail concerning the threat of bird flu, aka H5N1. There was one line that caught my eye:
There have been reports of H5N1 infection in domestic cats, pigs, tigers, leopards, ferrets, and stone martens.
Boy, am I glad I don't have a domestic tiger. I'd hate to catch the bird flu...
Wake me up
I think after a year I've finally adapted to a "first-shift" schedule. From 1993 until the end of last July, I worked the second shift--coming in at 3 in the afternoon and working until 11:30 at night. (Of course, in recent years that shift was often followed by either overtime work or internet surfing.) My eldest daughter had just been born when I started, so she, her stay-at-home mom and, eventually, her younger sister all ordered their lives around my schedule. We rarely used our alarm clock, except on Sunday mornings, the day when many people leave their alarms turned off. Generally we'd all get up when we were done sleeping, which meant any time from 7:30 in the morning for early riser Ga Dai's to 10:00 for the ever restful Siu Wan. Bedtime for the girls didn't come 'til ten or eleven o'clock, long after their peers were snug in their own beds. When we visited other families with children we had to remind ourselves about normal bedtimes, so as not t overstay our welcome. It wasn't a perfect life, but it was pretty darn good.
So when this China venture started, I figured it was the first shift life for the lot of us. I remembered days of yore, when I would climb out of bed at 6 or 6:30 or so and enjoy the morning light. Well, it never quite worked out that way. I mean, yeah, I started getting up a little earlier, but the family kept on their normal schedule. I was still staying up past midnight and as for waking up with the dawn.... well, why force yourself awake when there's no pressing appointment? Once we got to China, the status quo altered but little. At the beginning of the year, Yau Neih had no classes, so our schedule was our own. Once she did started teaching, there were only two days a week that she needed to get up for an 8:00 class. My wake up time crept forward slightly--I started getting up between 7:30 and 8:30--but Siu Wan continued to stay under the covers til her beloved 10:00 am. I resigned myself to the fact that we had become permanent late risers.
It was a bit of a presumption on my part. For the past two weeks we have been staying with my in-laws, who are early risers of long standing. After a few days of jet-lag, I found myself waking up first at 7 and now at 6:30. Even Siu Wan has managed to glimpse the earlier side of 9:00 am. It seems that we can adapt to first shift after all! The incident that brought it all to my attention was my attempt to do some banking the other day. Ga Dai was on the computer, so I figured I'd walk up to the bank and take care of some biz. It was about 9:30 or so. Everybody's open by then, right? Ah, I discovered otherwise as I arrived at the local branch ten minutes before it opened. I can't recall the last time that I had to wait for something to open. (Well, actually there was the time that we hit the barbecue place at 7:00 pm and they hadn't put out the food yet. But that had nothing to do with our sleep cycles and everything to do with the odd customs of Yunnan?) (How can you people wait until after 7 to eat such good food?) So now I can once again enjoy the morning quiet. I wonder if it will last once we head back to China? Time will tell.
Adjusting
Well, we've been "home" for over a week now. There hasn't been any major culture shock, more like a return to the familiar. Though there have been subtle changes in our habits and expectations. At mealtimes we're definitely used to smaller portions--a Whopper value meal filled me up. When I tried to nosh on some sweetened cereal I found myself wanting to cut down on the sugar. Outside of dining, I was kind of taken back by the lines at the grocery store. Unless I'm visiting Carrefores in Kunming, I'm used to being second in line at most. We've also been taken aback by people being rude and using four letter words in public. In China they may spit on the sidewalk, but they do it with civility.
For the most part, however, adjustment has been automatic. I didn't have to think twice about driving or using coins or leaving a tip. While the life we were living just a year ago seems like a distant dream, it really wasn't that long ago. Oh, well. If I was expecting to be radically transformed by the experience, I wasn't. Maybe that'll happen next year but for now I'm just the same old me.
Home again
Well, we made it. Thankfully, the journey went quite well. And what did we do when we arrived at mom-in-law's house? Well...
- Ga Dai read a Star Wars book in the back yard,
- Siu Wan climbed the apple tree,
- Yau Neih started unpacking and organizing things, and
- I checked the mail
How typical.
