It’s December 23rd, and the biggest thing going on with most people around here is the 16+ inches of snow we've gotten since last Wednesday night.  Seattle doesn't get snow too often, so it doesn't deal well with it.  And there are a lot of people that have never driven on snow before who are driving on these roads.  But the people that scare me the most are the ones who think because they're from <insert favorite place that regularly gets snow>, they can handle driving around here with no problems. 

They're wrong. 

The problem here isn't that it snows.  The snow here is no more treacherous than most "first snow of the season"s that I recall:  The ground starts out warm enough to melt the snow, but then it gets cold, so there's a layer of nasty ice underneath the snow.  But that's how it was in Salt Lake City, and Pocatello, and I'd guess that how the first snow of the season hits, all the time.  The trouble can be described mathematically, as 2 ratios:  The number of hills to the number of plows, and the number of cars to the number of plows.  I suspect both ratios are like 35,000:1.

There are no snow plows out keeping the streets from turning into solid snow floor while it’s snowing.  The primary arteries are all generally clear, for the same reason that they are clear anywhere:  more people drive on ‘em.  But when the secondary roads finally get a snow plow on ‘em, the plows wind up just ripping chunks out of the previously flat, relatively maneuverable snow floor, leaving behind a road that honestly reminds me of bouncing around on back roads in the middle of nowhere Idaho in my step-dad’s 4x4 pickup truck.  Try driving on roads like that, except where the dirt & rocks are just chunks of ice.  Then there are neighborhood streets:  You’re fine if it’s level, but I’d bet about 95% of the neighborhood streets have some random twist/turn/hill/roundabout, etc… every 350 yards or so.  And where ever there’s a turn/bend/bump people drive in different places on that road, so you wind up with everywhere that you might slide turning into an area that you can’t help but slide, thanks to the layer of ice underneath.

I hate driving, but I threw chains on Amy’s van and had no problems putting around the area.  But driving around here in snow is nothing like driving anywhere that gets regular snow.  So go ahead & make your snarky comments about how you can drive on snow.  But until you’ve done it around here, you have no idea what driving on Seattle snow is like. 

-Kev

A few nights back, we watched Die Hard 4.  It was terrible.  The movie was based on, as all the Die Hard movies have been, a handful of reliable stereotypes.  My father-in-law likes to complain that they screwed the story up terribly by not having someone in worse physical shape play the lead role.  Apparently that was one of the reasons he enjoyed the book so much:  he found the main character more like a normal person.  I guess American summer blockbuster movie makers would rather be able to apply a label to a person ("disgruntled estranged cop trying to make good") than actually try to do characterization.  And Die Hard 4 was chock full of movie stereo types:  Apathetic Hacker, Short-tempered yet well meaning law enforcement middle manager, jilted evil sociopath, and, most importantly, Evil Asian Kung Fu Hacker Woman.  I've seen a number of movies that have significant roles modeled around this stereotype.  While the movies aren't always what I hope for, the EAKFHW never disappoints.

I fully expected to meet hundreds of EAKFHW’s while in Shanghai. I based this expectation on the fact that I know so many people who match at least a few of the categories.  In my line of work, I meet a lot of hackers.  Not so many hackers in the typical mainstream media sense of breaking in to stuff, but in the more classical, purist definition:  one who produces elegant, quick solutions to difficult software problems.  Since I've been at Microsoft, I've met a large number of Asian hacker women, as well.  While they're not all Chinese, I honestly can't name too many Hacker women that aren't Asian.  Asian hacker women are actually the majority experience for me, of the broader "Hacker Women" community.

Since my 9-year-old started taking martial arts training a few years back, I've also had the opportunity to meet a number of Kung Fu women.  But none of them are Asian, and none of them are hackers.  And none of them seem particularly evil (though I'm pretty sure any one of them could take Bruce Willis in a fight)

Given the number of people I know that match at least 2 or more classes of the overall stereo, and that I've never lived anywhere larger than the Seattle areas, I figured probability would dictate that I'd meet a bunch of great representations of the stereotype.  Unfortunately, all the AHW I’ve met since coming here don’t really seem to be very evil, and I don’t think they have much Kung Fu experience, either…  I guess I always thought that the only reason I didn’t know any Evil Asian Kung Fu Hacker Women in the US was because our immigration bureaucracy was effective at keeping the evil ones out of our country. Perhaps they just don’t mingle much with us normal folk. Maybe they’re all from Xi'an. I’ll have to visit and see…

PS:  I intend no offense to any of the people I know (or who are reading this) that fit into any subset of the overall stereotype.  I don't have a single friend that doesn't fit at least one of the labels (and if you're a friend of mine, but don't believe you fit one of those labels, you're probably just evil :-)

My hair was getting out of control (I always let it get out of control), so I needed to get a hair cut.  There are at least 3000 different places to get your hair cut in Shanghai (I actually don't think that's much of an exaggeration)  I just went to the first one that I saw someone else actually getting a hair cut.  I went in expecting a slightly different experience, because I'd already seen a YouTube clip by some guy that showed the basics of his haircut.  Here's what happened:

First, she put some shampoo in my hair, and then squirted some water in it.  She worked up a good lather, and spent about 20 minutes giving me a very nice scalp massage.  Then she started scrubbing my ears, which is a little weird.  I've never had anyone scrub my ears before.  She took me over to the rinse stations, and rinsed my hair out, then sat me back down in the chair.  On the trip back to the chair, I saw a guy getting a neck massage in the chair.  After I sat back down, the woman asked me "<mandarin> Massage?" and made the hand sign for 6.  Actually, she pronounced it "massajee".  I figured, hey, nice neck & shoulder massage for 6 Yuan!  Sweet!  So after I said "Dui, dui", she led me into a side room that I hadn't noticed.  There were 3 or 4 other people in there getting massages (fully clothed).  So I figured I'd signed up for a full massage for a while.  60 minutes (what the 6 referred to) later, I'd learned the words for eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hurt (the only one I still remember is "hurt" - tong).  I also learned the name of the woman giving me the massage (Yeng Hai-Xia), and learned that a Chinese massage can leave my neck & shoulders in dire need of a more American style massage.

After the massage, she washed my hair again and delivered me to one of the barbers who did a very good job of cutting my hair.  He hadn't seen my hair before it was washed, so he had no idea how I did it normally, though.  So after I parted my hair the way I've worn it since, um, 1991 (I'm a slave to fashion), he grabbed the blow dryer to finish off the job.  Now in the US at this point, I usually make it clear that I don't put any goo in my hair, but since this guy wasn't offering any goo, I figured I was safe.  Boy was I wrong.  After spending about 6 minutes getting the hair on the front top part of my head to  stick up about 2" above my scalp, he did his best to take the remaining 30 hairs that cover my expanding bald-spot and poof them up to make it look like I'm not quite as balding as I really am.  And he was quite determined.

Anyway, about 2 hours later, 110 Yuan lighter (about $16) I walked in to the apartment and, before Amy could start laughing too much, asked her "How do you say 'Not so poofy!' in Chinese?"

I left work very early today.  My wife called me at about 10:30, barely audible through her sobs, and told me that my next door neighbor, friend, and overall decent human being had taken his own life a couple of days ago.  I took a taxi heading home, where there would be noise & distraction to keep me from falling to pieces the way I did to the 2 poor individuals who I only met 10 days ago.  Riding 13 miles in an unfamiliar city in a car with someone I couldn't communicate with was very surreal.  I'm living among 20 million people, and I find myself missing one man who was 6000 miles away on Monday, and is gone, now.  He was a good man who was always willing to help us, and was a very good neighbor.  The world is worse off without him in it.  I will miss him.

I need to find something to do with these emotions, find someway to deal with them.  It's too sudden, and too shocking.  My only other close experience with death was when my older brother passed away so many years ago.  I had an opportunity to say goodbye.  I was crushed when he died - I remember crying to sleep in my wife's arms that night.  But his death was slow, gradual, almost predictable, and when he died, it was what he needed, and I knew it.  Cancer had taken his eye, and was destroying his liver.  It was tragic, he was so young, so brilliant, so unfulfilled - so much lost potential & possibility.  But it wasn't sudden, shocking, and unexpected.

My neighbor was in his 60's, and had talked about his grandson with a glimmer in his eye before we left.  Suicide is so strange a concept to me, having never really dealt with any sort of depression at all, despite a significant family history.  I wouldn't feel so confused if he'd had a heart attack, or fallen of a ladder, or gotten in a car accident.  There would be a clear reason why he died.  But I don't have a reason, and I never will.  That's very hard.  I think what's so very difficult is that there may never have actually been one reason.

And I now come to the same point I came to with my brother.  He will be missed, but life moves on.  Knowing that John had wished us well on our trip here, that he hoped my family would have an adventure, I'll move on and try to make sure that our adventure is no less adventurous.

I'm from the Rocky Mountains:  small-town Idaho.  I've lived in many random towns in Idaho, none of which had more than 50,000 people (at least not when I lived there).  I think only 2 of them even had more than 10,000 people.  If I had to pick one theme that summarizes my small-town lower-, then middle-class western upbringing (as in "west of the 'mid-west'" which is really the almost east to us westerners :-) ), it's self-reliance.  Some acquaintances of ours from North Dakota have the same general attitude, which is why I extend the assertion to anything west of Ohio:  If you can do it yourself, you should do it yourself.  I can lay tile [self-taught], so I've tiled something like 800 sq ft of floor.  I've remodeled a bathroom.  I've painted probably more 20,000 sqft of wall.  I mow my own lawn.  I've scraped probably 1000 sq ft of (non-asbestos) 'popcorn ceilings'.  I've built a bunk bed, a diaper-changing station, installed baseboard trim throughout almost all of my house.  You get the idea.  Living in Bellevue, major recipient of the financial wake of Microsoft, certainly brought a set of odd adjustments that required me to change my perspective a bit, but my core theme has really stuck.

Three years ago, I met an interesting guy from Virginia, who has lived all over the country, and even spent some time in Thailand.  He made an interesting comment, when I asked if he was painting his new house.  He said his skill wasn't painting, it was earning money by coding. So he focuses on that, and pays other people to do other things like paint his house.  This idea was completely foreign to me.  Why would he not just paint his own house?  He's single, hadn't really unpacked yet, and the idea of not painting your own house interior had honestly not occurred to me as a possibility.

Why am I talking about this, and what does this have to do with my current situation?  One word:  Ayi.

I believe a literal translation is something like "Aunty", but what an Ayi really does is a combination nanny/maid/cook.  All we really needed one for is to watch Casen while Amy is home schooling the girls, and maybe watch the kids one night a week so Amy doesn't go completely insane while we're here.  But that's really not a full time gig.  So she does other stuff.  Scratch that.  She does ALL the other stuff.  And it just feels weird.  She's a very nice woman, who apparently has an 18 year old son and husband who both live in Zhengzhou, where she's from.  And she does everything around the apartment.  She tidies constantly.  She cooks, she does laundry, she wipes Casen's nose.  All for less than minimum wage from 1983.  And from what we hear from other people. we're paying her very well.  So Amy & I aren't doing jack-squat around the apartment, now.  Amy's actually able to focus on teaching the girls, and she really doesn't need to do anything else.  And when I get home from work, Anna's cooking dinner, the kids are playing with each other, and Amy's feeling useless.  I spent the whole time until she left at 7PM just playing with kids and talking to Amy.  I washed the dishes, so Anna could shower and head home to where ever she lives, because I felt so lazy & useless.  Because if I can do something, I should. 

But I've realized something:  My strongest skill is earning money by working at Microsoft.  It has been for a long time, now.  And while I can cook, tidy, watch children, etc..., there are a whole lot of people on this side of the planet that can do all that, but can't earn much money doing anything else.  And there's another thing I can do.  I can help change that.  So I'm paying a very nice woman to wipe our 2 year old's nose.  Because if I can do something, I should.

I'm really having so much fun that I don't want to work.  I wonder if Microsoft would pay me to just play in China for 3 months?  Actually, when I stop goofing around in Shanghai and start thinking about work, I am pretty excited.  Besides Bruce, who I've known almost my whole career at Microsoft, and Terry Leeper, who I've know his whole career at Microsoft, I've also met 2 other members of the team I'll be working with, and I'm really looking forward to putting faces on the e-mail names of the rest of the group.  I'm going to try to catch the 7AM bus, because it looks like they killed the 6AM bus :-(.

For dinner tonight, we decided to try a "local" restaurant.  It's called "Little Sheep" and they serve what I believe are called "Hot Pots".  When we walked in the place, we had no idea what to expect, and I don't think there was a single person in the restaurant that spoke a word of English.  So we pointed, and my amazing wife communicated a few things in Mandarin, and we were good to go.  We got a 'Nourishing Soup' base which they put on a burner to start boiling, then we ordered strips of beef, lamb, a vegetable medley tray, a "medley of balls" and some noodles.  The kids did quite well with the chopsticks, though Casen only liked to skewer meat balls and hold them up to watch the steam as they cooled.  They all ate something, and Amy, Megan, and I all walked out feeling that thoroughly pleasant "too full" feeling of eating so much yummy food that you can't pack in any more.

We walked home at which point I trudged back to the Grand Gateway to try our ATM card again, as it failed at the Fabric Market.  Turns out that all the American Banks take an ATM hiatus at about 2 am Sunday morning, and turn back on around 6AM.  So no cash for us on Sunday afternoon (I visited 4 ATM's before Amy called me to confirm that Visa said that was true).  Stupid global roaming blackout!  Anyway, it turned back on around 6PM local time, and we've now learned our lesson...  I wet back and grabbed some more cash, along with some "Rocky Chocolate" ice cream for Amy.  Hot Pots for dinner, and Ice Cream for dessert.  Life is good...

I also thought I might start chronicling (sp?) the funny translations I see while I'm out.  Today's is "For You Shanghai, Youth Outstanding Person".  You might think that's not really funny, just gibberish, and if it were printed on some pamphlet, I would agree with you.  But that lettering is 8 feet high on a batch of signs that are probably 3 stories high.  If you're making signs that big, perhaps consulting with either a native speaker or a student of the language would make sense :-)

Off to bed before I pass out.  Jet lag still sucks, just not quite as badly as it did 5 days ago...

Amy already talked about our very cool 'tour' of the city of Shanghai on February 28th.  It was pretty limited, but very fun.  Theresa Wang was incredibly helpful, and really good with the kids, letting Chloe just talk her ear off almost the whole day.  Ken [forgot his last name] was also on the tour with us.  His qualifications were, uh, he's been in Shanghai for a year, and he's not from China :-).  He was really helpful in offering a few interesting perspectives.  While Amy was using a restroom at the Yu Yuan Gardens, the kids were eating some ice cream sitting on a ledge.  We had around 75 people watching us, with one woman with 4 teeth (Casen said "Where'd her teeth go?  She needs to go to the store and buy new teeth!") taking Casen's hand to walk off with him!  After that whole thing, Ken pointed out that for many Chinese, the trip to Shanghai is something they save their whole lives for.  They've never seen a foreigner before, and they're not likely to see one again.  It certainly gave me more patience with the 4-toothed child-stealer :-).

I was really impressed by how well the 3 kids did, after being driven all over the place, and forced to walk everyone all day long.  By 5 PM, however, Casen was done.  So we didn't get quite as much junk as we needed from Ikea.  So today (March 1 - I'm now 34 years old...) I took him with me as I explored the Metro and went down to Ikea.  The Xujiahui station is like a mini-city beneath an already impressive above ground area.  Casen loved all the escalators, and watching the trains come & go.  He wasn't as excited as I thought he would be by the actual ride on the subway, but he wasn't upset at all.

Once we got off the metro, we headed above ground.  Most Chinese people I've met here are almost offensively "pro-boy".  I have 2 beautiful, brilliant, amazing daughters, and yet no one comments about them except to say I have 2 daughters & one SON!  Then they faun all over Casen.  Mind you, when he's in a good mood, and he says "Ni Hao!" to everyone in earshot, he is pretty adorable, but when I'm out with Megan or Chloe, I don't get even a tenth of the smiles from people on the streets.  I should probably get off this subject.  People that know me well know that I'm pretty outspoken about equality & how much that kind of stuff irritates me.  The thing that drives me the craziest around here is that everyone that sees us with 3 kids, 2 girls and then a boy, believes that the reason we had 3 children was so we could have our boy.  In reality, when we discovered we were having a boy, both Amy & I were fairly shocked:  we just assumed we were going to have a 3rd girl, and were quite excited about it.  Not that having a boy was a disappointment, just a very big surprise:  we weren't happy or sad to have a boy, just not expecting it.  I'll try not to talk about that subject any more.  I imagine Chinese society might start understanding the value of women if they're male/female ratio winds up in a bad state.

Anyway, as Casen demanded a 'shoulder-ride' and I tossed him up in the air over my head and sat him on my shoulders about 40 people must have been staring as him, and smiling.  We went into Ikea, which, as most people told me, is exactly like every other Ikea (almost), and found the extra things we needed.  We got through the check out at 11:30 and Casen was hungry so we got in line for a hot dog.  And this is where the Shanghai Ikea is different from the one in Seattle:  A hot dog was 3 RMB.  That's roughly 42 cents.  An ice cream cone was 1 RMB!  15 cent ice creams, just like my mother (okay, perhaps my grandfather - my mom's still a spring chicken) told me about!  So Casen downed his hot dog like the walking vacuum cleaner he is, and then we got a couple of ice creams, and headed back to the metro station.  We walked back to the house, stopping a couple times to convince Casen that he should A) hold my hand, and B) walk because my shoulders had all of his 40 lbs. frame they could handle for one day.  Amy took the girls out to go pick up a birthday cake from a yummy french bakery for me, and we played on the toys for a while.

Once we went inside, I got pretty sleepy, so I laid down while Casen was napping.  Amy decided to take the girls down to the big playground and let them play for a while, and I didn't set an alarm, so she woke me up when they got back up more than 2 hours later.  Needless to say, that didn't help my still-screwed-up internal clock...  She actually met Bruce at the playground and chatted with him for a while.  I've known him since I started at Microsoft almost 11 years ago, so Amy's met him a few times.  I think the conversation with someone not named Kevin was good for her.  She was in a great mood when she came upstairs, and recommended we order dinner from Blue Frog, which, according to Bruce, makes the best burgers he's ever had.  After ordering them, I'll agree:  If you want a hamburger, come to Shanghai.  Best burger I've ever eaten.  Salt Lake City has a chain of restaurants called "Training Table" that has relatively good hamburgers, but nothing I've ever had comes close to the Montana BBQ burger I had.

During dinner Amy made a bit of a stunned face, and then let out a disappointed "awww...".  She realized that while she bought candles  for my cake, she had no way to light them.  Then she actually opened the cake up.  The bakery included not only matches, but candles, forks, places, and a serving knife!  When the Shanghai-ese sell you a birthday cake, they sell you the whole package!

All in all, a fairly good birthday.  Particularly for a 34th.  On the bright side: only 1 more year until I can be president :-)

A few days back I went to an electronics store about 200M past the Best Buy in hopes of getting a couple more power plug adapters for cheaper than the 58Y that we paid our first day at Best Buy.  The place is called "gome" (probably pronounced Go May).  I found it because when we went to Xujiahui Park, and I saw a big sign that said "PCMALL" across Zhaoziabang Road, so I thought I'd check it out.

Initially, it felt a lot like a Circuit City or Best Buy.  But when I headed over to the section called "components" to get a couple of dealy-bobs (technical name), a salesman approached me.  I pointed to the 4 items I needed, and he got them off the wall rack for me, then proceeded to fill out 3 separate half-sheets of paper for them (2 power adapters, a VGA cable, and a Stereo-Miniplug -> dual RCA jacks).  Then he pointed me at a little counter in the back of the store that said "cashier" above it.  I walked back there, gave them the papers, the nice girl behind the counter tallied up the total, then stamped each of the papers, then printed up 3 receipts, each with 4 copies, and stamped all 12 copies and handed me 3.  When we ordered dinner last night, the delivery guy left us with probably 12 pieces of paper each that looks like an odd combination of money and lottery ticket.  When we bought a few toys from an overpriced toy store, you show them the toy, they give you a piece of paper, then you take that piece of paper, with the toy, up to the cashier, who takes your paper, and prints up a new set of receipts, one of which you get.  Plus you have to sign the credit card receipt.  THis place is totally paper-crazy.  For any random purchase, I wind up with at least 2, or more frequently 4 or 5 pieces of paper, generally container various stamps of some sort.  Apparently, the phunny-money lottery tickets we got when we got our first meal delivered were tax receipts.  The restaurant must buy them and give them to people to prove they paid taxes.  The way it actually works is that some of those receipts actually win money, thus providing an incentive to the customers to demand them, thus forcing the company to actually pay taxes.  There are so many things that, at first glance seem very nonsensical to me, but when looked at from a different perspective make perfect sense.  But I still don't get why everything has to be paper :-)

We arrived Monday night and had an interesting ride to the apartment (I counted 12 times when we were, quite literally, within inches of another vehicle, traveling about 50MPH).  Once we got in the apartment, I discovered I was immediately indebted to Alain Raitt, one of the CLR team's test managers.  He mentioned what the mattresses were like, and I remembered to pack an air mattress.  Our 3 bedroom apartment has 1 king size bed, and 2 queen size beds.  And each bed has what Americans call a "Box Spring" and nothing else.  For American beds, the box spring is what you put under the mattress.  Aside from that, the apartment is fairly nice.  It's furnished in 100% Ikea Black & Silver, with dark hard wood floors.  The bathrooms are very nice, though the water smells of something odd (and according to Frommer's it's not even safe to brush your teeth with).  We've got a 5 gallon water tank, which is now down by about 2 gallons.

The electrical outlets will accept 3 different styles of plugs, but not grounded American plugs, or 'directional' American plugs (where one prong is wider than the other).  We went to Best Buy & bought an 'everything' surge protector, which lets you plug almost anything into anything.  There are a couple of stupid things that we own that don't like 240V 50Hz, but all the computers & computer peripherals take anything from 100V-240V, and 50-60Hz.  We paid way to much for a printer for school work for the girls, and wandered around a big mall.  Elevators around here are A) tiny and B) rare.  I think the stroller is a total lost cause - too many escalators & stairs.

I think the biggest problem we've had so far has been trying to figure out how to work the heaters in the apartment.  Everything is written in Chinese on the remotes, so we couldn't really figure out how to get the heaters working.  We woke up last night at midnight to a bedroom of 28C (82F) and turned it off.  I don't think the girls minded too much, because it was so cold during the day (like 35F, with 20MPH winds...) that they were huddling under their sweaters, vests, coats, and for Chloe, her robe too!

We were supposed to go to the International Health Center this morning to get our health screening for our visa's, but last week the company that was doing that for us closed their Shanghai office, which I learned of because my e-mail to the woman who was supposed to meet us there bounced.  So I sent a slightly nasty sounding e-mail to 3 or 4 different people [I probably wouldn't have been so nasty sounding, except I was really tired] yesterday afternoon, and a very nice woman from Microsoft Law & Corporate Affairs called me and is getting things straightened out.  So now we have to go get some groceries, then talk to the apartment manager who's going to help us at the local police station to register with the local authorities.

Anyway, I'd better get going - the boy is running around here in his pajamas cutting a piece of paper into little tiny triangles, and we don't yet own a broom :-)