Big, late New Years update.

Big, late New Years update

First of all, for all those who follow my family through Facebook… I’m sorry… I cannot usually access Facebook. Its blocked in China and to access I have to go through my VPN, which is really slow. So…if you want me to respond to comments, please go to my blog chat, or directly email me (taikongren@gmail.com)

So its been a while since the last post, and some have complained about this. Where to start?

The following has occurred since the last update (not all of which is in chronological order):
On Christmas we went to a school party. Haga made Tofu brownies and everyone ate them up. Akiva sang some ecumenical Christmas songs.

On Christmas day, we ate lasagna. This is the first time we started our new Christmas day tradition…to eat lasagna. Haga made it. Very delicious.

Haga made a custom-made down-jacket, which makes her look very cute.

The kids and Haga got some stomach virus/flue on Dec 30th, so during our New Years vacation they were inside all day, eating rice porridge every meal. Akiva and Haga threw-up and had diarrhea for several days. Kenaz just got sick for 2 days. I was really worried about getting sick, in part because I had to do a training on a new performance management system for my customer, as well as have big important meetings with so-called important people visiting from HQ. Fortunately, I did not get sick. So… we watched a lot of “The Lion King”, and some Hayao Miyazaki films (Totoro, etc)

I’ve been working about 11 hours a day, without procrastination. Its pretty cool.

We had mushroom soup hotpot… twice. Expensive. But supposedly very healthy.

The restaurant is on ShiHuiFang (师惠坊… on that food street across from Blue Marlin）. We ate mushrooms that were supposed to reduce coughing, increase immunity, and make our skin better. After we ate mushrooms, the waiter adds home-made delicious noodles. Great stuff, but we spend around 250 RMB when we go there.

We saw “Dance with Wolves – 2010” (er…”Avatar”). Somewhat entertaining. Visually great. But it’s the usual story about a white American who goes to live with the natives, learns their ways, then uses his superior organizational skills to lead the natives in revolt against the rich corporate types. Although the story was derivative and predicatble, at least the move was put together by someone who knows how a movie should be put together (unlike Michael Bay).