First, we’re moving back to the States! NYC to be specific. That’s what the countdown is for. We leave early morning Christmas Eve for our new but temporary home in the Upper East Side at 75th and 3rd. We have many exciting and grand plans regarding getting jobs that actually pay when and what they say they will yet aren’t that overbearing on the rest of our lives so that we’d have time to maintain an active non-work life in the evenings and on weekends and take vacations throughout the year. I have grand plans for a balcony where we can grow fancy vegetables and set up a fire pit on which I intend to cook hearty soups with my cast iron pot, skewer vegetables and meats, grill different kinds of fish in one of those neat looking fish-grilling-baskets, and roast marshmallows, all under the glow of any and all seasonally appropriate skies. I’m going to be more revealing here than anywhere else public on the inter-webs, but you know, I’m feeling excited about these new prospects so any unforeseen consequences of my openness be damned. We’re also going to be stopping off first at Maria’s parents place in Ohio, and though it’s seeing her side of the family again in a relatively short amount of time, we feel its appropriate as it’s quite close to NYC and we intend to take possession of her parents old minivan. Yes, I will be driving a minivan, feel free to start the ribbing on that one. But I’d just like to point out the obvious benefits of one:

1. we can carry STUFF! (Costco, free stuff from Craigslist, people, moving)
2. we can go on ROAD TRIPS (which I love, and if necessary even sleep in the van)
3. it’s obviously free (they have more cars than drivers right now)
4. it’ll be reminiscent and nostalgic of those days when I owned a pickup truck, but minus the tiny little seats in the cab that faced each other whenever I tried to haul more than 2 people

We’re in the gigantically messy process of packing up our entire lives, once again, like we did a year and a half ago for our move to China. Feels kind of full circle in a way. We were lucky, having never settled that well, which was actually a problem in and of itself but at least it’s come to benefit us now in that though we’ve acquired some more things than before, we still don’t have that much stuff. We used to fit in 8 suit cases, we now fit in 10, and we still don’t have furniture. That means our temporary apartment in NYC is actually furnished (thanks to you know who!), and we’ve tentatively given ourselves 2 months to figure it all out, permanent jobs, permanent apartments, permanent routines, etc. This does also mean that we may have to remove our blog from the expat blog listings, but I’ll comfort myself by creating new NYC centric categories and tags. I will most likely still be working within the web programming field, and Maria’s thinking of re-entering law or perhaps finance. We will both of course still work with our fancy little Enterprise Consulting company in whatever fashion that “work with” may mean.

The explanation for the lateness of this entry is that we’ve been kind of sub-consciously messing up our sleeping schedules, I think so that we’ll have an easier time when we get to the States adjusting to US time again (civilized time?), but it’s not been easy these past 3 weeks actually, ever since we got back the last time to China after Thanksgiving. Immediately after landing we found ourselves smack in the middle of final negotiations to close our JV VC deal, a process that involved many Chinese lawyers and lots of legalese and staying up to the middle of the night every night hammering through all the details involved and trying to explain it all to our partners who aren’t native English speakers and were giving themselves headaches just trying to parse the individual sentences. I discovered I have quite a knack for this stuff actually, an innate ability to understand those massively long and complex legal sentences, and if nothing else I provided good translation services because wouldn’t you know it, though the JV is international and the governing documents are in English (and even governed by NY law), Maria and I were the only people with any thorough command of the English language and the negotiations even happened in Chinese, something brand new I’ve never experienced before in my life. Lots of fun, though insanely tiring, and happening all at the same time as my IFC concert. When it rains and all that. We did close, on time even, or basically, terms and conditions met and documents signed and all, and I had my concert, which I mentioned in an earlier post was a success, then I had another concert in Shanghai of all places which I also mentioned, and we go to see our new Enterprise Consulting company’s facilities at that incubator (which I also mentioned?), and well, the sum of it all was that in the span of 3 weeks, we’ve managed to:

1. negotiate and close a JV VC deal
2. sing Handel’s Messiah twice in Beijing with the IFC
3. sing Handel’s Messiah twice in Shanghai with the IFC
4. inspect our company’s holdings in Shanghai (at least some)
5. end Maria’s MBA program (I won’t say more than just this stated fact, though there’s obviously SO much more details that can be had here, but suffice it to say we’re obviously not continuing with the program if we’re leaving the country)
6. pack and finalize moving details
7. sing at the British Ambassador’s residence (did I mention that? We sang carols. It was good)
8. move all the furniture in the apartment back the way it was (we had optimized it, but now we need to un-optimize it since we’ve not going to be using it)
9. have a tiny little family oriented engagement party (yes, that’s the other thing, we got engaged! I don’t want to dwell too much on this point either as I’m kind of running out of blogging steam, but it’s self explanatory isn’t it? We’ve been together for almost 3 years now! This upcoming February! And we look forward to the infinitely better water pressure and hot water temperature that the States has to offer)
10. have a massive Beijing friends oriented engagement/going away party in which we either drank through or gave away all of our remaining booze, of which there were, and somehow still are, lots
11. actually get my work visa and residence permit (yes, I realize the irony involved in 3 days before leaving a country finally getting the necessary paperwork and documents in place to stay in said country easily and indefinitely really. Let’s chalk it up to “well now I can come and go as I please”)

What else happened? I think that about sums it all up. The plan for these remaining days is to finish our packing, close some necessary accounts (telephone, internet, cell phone), actually ship everything we want, then do some last minute tourist stuff like see the Great Wall and the 798 Arts District. It takes something like moving out of the country to really motivate you to do those little touristy stuff that you never had a chance or the motivation to, though that’s mostly me. Maria’s been wanting to do these things for ages, but I guess we had planned to be here for a lot longer so there was almost always more time. Ah well, we’ll take care of it. I also plan to, once we’ve finished getting everything shipped, have a proper blog entry on the details regarding said process as at the moment the inter-web’s information regarding how best to cheaply but slowly ship your material from this country to the States is limited. I will rectify this missing bit of much needed information. Oh, and in the process of packing, I managed to kill one of my computer’s hard drives, but it’s ok, it was the system drive which for some stupid (but in the end alright) reason also housed the backup of the system drive. Chalk it up to me forgetting which partition sat on which physical disk, but it means I actually didn’t lose any DATA, of which I had a lot, and would have been very sad were I to have lost it. My RAID drives are fine, my one off data drive is fine, I only lost my system and the backup of said system. I couldn’t have actually planned it any better if I were trying, otherwise I could have lost my one off data partition…I hate data loss, and considering I was very careful with the drive even and can’t imagine why or how I managed to mess it up so much, it really just points out and highlights once again the necessity to own a massively large NAS. I’m shooting for the 8-bay QNAP NAS with 2TB drives. Haven’t decided what RAID level I want though, maybe just Mirroring, maybe 5 + hot spare, maybe 6 + hot spare. At minimum, with Mirroring, I’ll still have 8TB of storage versus my piddling little 1.5TB now, and it will be wonderful. Today was the first time I realized but Maria pointed out how there’s a sort of religious aspect to technology. It’s “thank God” I didn’t lose my data, and the appropriate feeling of “relief” and “fulfillment” from having a really good plan and system to handle it all. It’s like “fate” or “destiny” that I messed up where my system backups were stored, otherwise I would have lost data. So once again I thank whatever technology God(s) there may be.

Oh, and I fully intend to keep up my QQ accounts. Gotta grow and steal those vegetables, those “farm” animals, and now maintain my little vegetarian restaurant.

So this redesign had a couple of initial inspirations.

1) I like text based layouts. I always have, and I probably always will. I never quite understood what all the fuss about pictures were and images and graphics and all that crap. It probably comes from the fact that I was a writer first and foremost, and an artist in other senses of the word later. Obviously then, this redesign is heavily text based, read entirely text based.

2) I have a couple of Flash mp3 players on my site for music I’ve written in the past and music I’ve recorded for my Maria. As some of you may know, the problem with Flash mp3 players is that as soon as the page gets refreshed, the playing stops, and you have to start over again. Some solutions other sites have used, and even myself at one point or another in the past, is to have the player show up in a little pop up window so that even if the main page gets refreshed, it can sit there happily and play away. I never liked that idea anyways, so the only other solution would be for all the other elements on a page to be loaded and reloaded via AJAX so that there are no actual page refreshes. I suppose another option would be to have the refreshing elements of a page loaded through an iframe, but I don’t really count that as a solution, not that I’m trying to be an iframe hater here.

3) I wanted to create a decently fancy javascript based animation. I’ve known for a long time that with the development of HTML 5 and all the new javascript libraries out there, the necessity for Flash to animate elements on a site is being phased out (though Flash still seems necessary to create a decent multi-track mp3 player for some reason…). Most page effects, menus, even some animations, can be handled by javascript now. So I wanted to give it a try and create one of those animated logos that fancy companies have. And so I did. I also just wanted in general to have a seamless user interface, but that’s another point. Since I wanted the animation, I obviously only wanted it to show the once because it’ll be a pain in the ass to keep seeing the same animation on every page load, hence even more reason for the entirely AJAX based layout.

4) I wanted there to be a seamless user interface and experience. I didn’t want there to be page refreshes, I wanted everything to be fluid, I wanted everything to be accessible. I actually had in mind a much fancier menu system for the posts/tags/categories browsing, but that went by the way side mostly because I lost interest and like it this way anyways. Obviously though to achieve such a kind of site you have to heavily rely on javascript and AJAX.

5) I just wanted to keep my skills up. I’m kind of only partially employed at the moment, moving from tiny little projects to tiny little projects, getting paid only some of the time, so I wanted to make sure that my programming abilities didn’t dull. That’s one of my biggest fears actually, that one day I will be 30 all of a sudden and without a single marketable and useful skill. I really want to avoid that. Not that this project was the world’s most challenging, I didn’t have to create any classes of my own or any large PHP files, but it took clever thinking to do, I think at least, to get around what needed to be gotten around and come up ultimately with the feature set wanted.

And so, without much more talking about all that, I present the new layout and its features:

1) Entirely text based
2) Entirely javascript and AJAX based for all post navigation, browsing, etc.
3) Widgets enabled, with widgets floating and draggable within the site.
4) Built in support for Flash MP3 Player, Flash XSPF MP3 Player, and Flash JW Video Player
5) Custom photo gallery support using jQuery
6) Although everything is loaded via AJAX, a direct link is generated to bring you back to any part of the site

And now a couple of interesting challenged:

1) I had to create a plugin to be the receiving end of all the AJAX requests, plus I’m operating entire outside of the WordPress Loop.

2) Given that jQuery more specifically operates on DOM elements generated when a page reaches its onready state, the newly generated HTML elements from the AJAX requests aren’t accessible, so the javascript code is a mish-mash of actual jQuery code intermixed with normal javascript code that have also been then intermixed with some jQuery code as well. Kind of messy, but straightforward enough for even the everyday javascript developer. Again, one of those do what you can, what you must kind if things.

3) Getting comments to work was a pain! At one point I had miswrote “_id” and “_ip” instead of “_ID” and “_IP” so my comments were going into the void, showing up in the WordPress Dashboard as existing (a number), but then not visible in anyway. I had to track it down through phpMyAdmin before I realized the key value associating a comment with a post”_ID” was missing…Also the fact that I had to reset the timezone based on the WordPress value, not something one would normally think about.

4) I think I’m going to make this post Sticky, at least for this particular theme. I installed a new plugin that allows me to test drive themes, so it only needs a querystring variable of “&theme=text” for anyone to see the new layout.

Other thoughts:

I think this theme will never exist formally for use. I’m thinking of stripping away its respective parts and coding a normal WordPress them with them, so the text based layout without any of the AJAX. I’ve already got it all pretty much sorted out and that process I’m hoping will be relatively painless. It’s just, I’m not sure if this AJAX only version should actually be used in any major way…

Since this post will be Sticky in the AJAX only version of the theme, I’ll probably keep updating it as I go along with specifics of what had to be done to get everything working.

Some To Do’s still:

1) Since I’m running 2 themes using 1 set of widgets, it’s a little messed up in the new theme because there are 6 widgets crammed into 4 clots.
2) The new theme still doesn’t recognize when a user is logged in. Mostly relevant for things like commenting and “Edit” links.
3) I don’t have a posts tags yet…something you’d think would be easy huh? But apparently outside of the Loop, it’s NOT!

[edit]
This was actually also inspired by the fact that I came across this header graphic that I had created many, many years ago for another project that never got off the ground.

[edit 2]
And it validates! And I even went through the trouble of making a screenshot and theme description and meta for the WP Admin.! w00t!

So it’s quite late, and I’ve been tossing and turning in bed for a good while now. The issue is that I’ve been all of a sudden sick again, and it’s not been that great of an experience. I really do believe it’s due to the sudden changes in the weather and ambient temperature as opposed to any drastically low temperatures in and of itself; I don’t think my bodies knows what to do when things keep changing! It prepares and is ready for it to be warm or cold, but it can’t handle the shift, and so dies, metaphorically.

The point though, is that while I’ve been sick, I’ve been either not very productive at all, or decently productive on some of my web projects. So assuming I spend half my time productive, half of it not, and a good potion of the rest asleep or in a daze, accounting for time to spend with my Maria of course, I should have time left everyday to blog. Right? So why is it that I don’t, and why is it that it’s been nigh on three weeks since anyone’s updated this blog?

I think it has to do with the actual concept of blogging. Before now, as in, literally a couple of minutes ago, I was suffering quite contentedly in bed, unable to sleep, dreading the possibility that I might be disturbing Maria’s rest as well. And my mind was racing. I was thinking about my restaurant’s website (which isn’t up yet), my art website, which is up here, and some new stuff I’m planning to do for my choir, which, obviously, isn’t up either, neither is the West Campus site. Incidentally, this would be the first time I’m plugging my art website…everyone go and look at it! It represents the “best” of Beijing’s urban youth, or so the propaganda page tells me.

West Campus, incidentally, is a school I’m starting in Beijing! It will at first only offer year long intensive Chinese language and culture courses, hopefully starting Fall 2010, but will move on to offer full study abroad options for a liberal arts education, hopefully with a Fall 2011 availability so we can start searching for partner US institutions. Grandiose, no? They also get a website, one to provide information, brochures, contact information, and a way to register online…hmmm…I wonder if I’ll get paid for any of this web work; they’re all decently complicated…

Um…but yes my mind was racing, and I was even mentally ranting to myself, “hmmmm…this would make a good blog post.” So here I am, finally. Partly also due to he fact that I got tired of lying in bed unable to sleep and I wanted to spec. out the requirements for the IFC website.

So what this post will be about then is just a mish-mash of everything’s that’s been going on, with the hopes that it will make some greater sense, and that it will in some small way make up for the lack of anything interesting floating around here. Ah I’ve also modified the layout a bit to have static headers and footers; I’m not sure I like it…

So I think the restaurant’s a good place to start. We’re switching owners. My aunt and uncle, God bless them, are no longer going to be working with us, thank God. This means that we have to find somebody to buy out their 50% stake in the restaurant for $$$K, plus work out some way to repay the $$$K RMB that they “loaned” to the business to cover operational costs. Without going into too much of the details because I’m not entirely sure I’m at liberty to say at the moment, it’s being worked out, and it should be good.

What I am most excited about is the possibility of greater interactions with a local farm that my father is associated with. This should allow us to get good dairy and meat supplies, plus develop new foods like homemade cheese! I’ve been missing cheese in this country, and I have grandiose dreams of being Beijing’s one and only source for freshly made mozzarella. There is also the possibility that we may partner with another good friend of ours and jointly open yet another restaurant in the same complex as Connections. This will be a all vegetarian restaurant, specializing in fresh juices, fruit and vegetable cocktails, and entree size salads, something wholly lacking in this country. This will also entail greater cooperation with the farm as we will need to grow the entree salad vegetables, things like endive, mescalin, arugula, also things either lacking or inconsistent in this country, and which I will even admit to missing. Again, I have grandiose dreams of being Beijing’s one and only source for fresh, home grown, specialty vegetables.

I am also leaving my role as full time manager of the restaurant, mostly because it’s too time consuming. I have faith and confidence in my staff and the training I’ve provided them, and will still be on hand in a very part time manner, perhaps a couple of hours every other day. I’m going to promote on waitstaff and one cook to be my eyes, hands, and ears while I’m away, and they will be responsible in my absence. We’ve been kind of operating this way for the past week, mostly due to circumstance since I was sick, but also due to premeditation because I was just sick of being there 91 hours a week, and things seem quite smooth. Again, I have faith.

The only other thing interesting about the restaurant is that I think I’ve finalized with my choir, the IFC, the option of using Connections as their “home away from home,” or “home base,” the most pertinent bit of which would be the using of it as their ticket distribution hub. I needn’t tell you all the great benefits this entails. I had always wanted a stronger tie between the restaurant and my choir, and this provides it. Part of the reason why I got a piano for the restaurant was so that there can be impromptu rehearsals, sections, or other music related events, open mics, sing alongs, etc. that can happen at the restaurant and involve the choir. If I can be the one and only place to get tickets for our upcoming concerts, then that’s a step in the right direction. The website I’m spec’ing out for them is to give them the ability to handle online ticket sales on their own without using a third party service that charges an obscene service charge per transaction. Plus, it looks like my Epiphany music center idea may come to fruition at some point relatively soon as well, and all these things will work so well together I just know it.

Which is a great segue for that topic! I got Cary, my father’s business partner, interested in Epiphany. I think he’s always been half way interested, though no one’s taken the initiative to develop it really. My father had done some work, and I’ve built off of that to come to where we are now. Again, without going into too much details because I may not be at liberty to say, but it’ll be good, and it’ll be THE place to go for all your classical music needs in the “heart of Beijing” so to speak, or so the propaganda page states ;)

Also since I am no longer going to be the full time manager at the restaurant, I’m relegated myself to the status of “owner,” which means I get paid when the restaurant is profitable, or if and when that is. This means I’ve been on the prowl for a normal job, hopefully something in a programming vein. I had interviewed with and received a very decent job offer from Pixomondo, a visual effects company opening their Beijing office. Unfortunately, the timing had sucked because I was just getting deep into the running of the restaurant so I turned their offer down. Or more, I didn’t respond when they asked me if they could negotiate my offer with me…my defense on this issue is that I was really busy, as I’ve always been, and it was during New Years so things were extra hectic. But yes, I should have gotten back to them no matter what and it’s my bad for not. The point also being then that I feel awkward approaching them again since I sort of brushed them off earlier. I’ve also interviewed with Wokai.org, a micro-financing company. They’re in first round interviews, and they’re supposed to get back to me. And if any of you reading this know of any good PHP Programmer jobs, let me know! I’ve already been thinking about posting to this blog post photos of my new Connections menu, I think I’ll also post my resume. I NEED A JOB!!! PLEASE HELP!!!

Our visas are also expiring, again. This will be our, what, third entry? Haven’t figured out where to leave to yet, but need to soon, we have just under a week left to clear immigration. Part of the other reason a “normal” job sounds appealing is that they should be able to help me sort out my work visa issue. At the moment, the stand still is that VSM hasn’t gotten back to me yet on my employment verification letter, which is the last thing I need before one round of work visa applications with my father can be filed. They’ve sort of fallen off the face of the earth at the moment, I wonder if they’re alright…But since I’ve stepped back from the restaurant, this next trip promises to be much better, and longer, and more fun, I promise, my dearest Maria. I know I’ve been sucking lately, being sick, being busy, but I promise better times ahead.

Whoo I’m on a roll aren’t I! And real tag happy :)

Regarding Maria, since a lot I’m not at liberty to myself say, I will say that she did very well on the GMAT, finished her MBA applications to Tsinghua and BiMBA, is plowing her way through her Chinese government scholarships, was NOT late for any scholarships at Tsinghua or BiMBA, and has many promising projects coming up involving Chinese lawyer and my father. And that’s all I’ll say.

Let’s upload that menu now shall we? And don’t laugh at the over the top English; it hasn’t been edited yet.

Let’s also get the resume uploaded shall we? Download now

And now I’m feeling a little dehydrated and shaky. I should probably stop now as I think I’ve got most things covered, and those that I haven’t, I’ll try to list out real quick. I also need to upgrade this WordPress install before I’m finished.

1) We’re still looking for an apartment. We’ve had a reprieve because my mother’s not coming until June, but that’s feeling like it’ll be here real soon. We’re playing around with the option of living in the complex that Connections is in because we have so many things going on there (Connections, Epiphany, the new vegetarian restaurant), plus we also want to start our own business so it seems also appropriate, but there’s a lot of logistics involved with that mostly due to the fact that it’s commercial real estate and so is more expensive and lacking a kitchen and plumbing.
2) My best friend from high school’s wedding is coming up in mid-May, so we’ll be both going back to the US around then. Maria’s going to go earlier, see some family, and run her first marathon in Cincinnati! I will, unfortunately, be unable to attend. But this should mean we’ll have exciting things to look forward to come October and the Beijing marathon :)
3) I only need 40 some odd words to get to 2000 at this point, so I’m just stalling and rambling until then. It seems like a nice, round, number, and may very well be the longest blog post we’ve had. I had been toying with the idea of separating this one entry into multiple entries, and just post them all at the same time. But that also felt stupid. Not that this monster of a post isn’t stupid in and of itself, there’s just no lesser evil with those two choices…

Edit:

Already had to correct a couple of typos, and I just realize I never tested the new sites I’m developing in IE, because I don’t have access to IE anymore! I should get around to that huh…?

Maria is at a trial class today at Tsinghua University. I don’t remember if we had mentioned this earlier, but she wants to attend either there or Beijing University (Peking University) for their MBA programs; Tsinghua SEM iMBA and BiMBA respectively. They’re both “international” MBA programs, targeted to foreigners. It’s been three hours since I dropped her off; apparently it’s a long class.

Things are in progress as far as a whole slew of things that are going on.

Connections Bar and Grill: This is the restaurant that it appears I will be taking over shortly as General Manager. There’s been a good bit of family politics going on involving disagreements with the current GM and some potential investors, but that’s all being taken care of and I’d rather not get into the details and/or specifics because I’m not sure I should. Suffice it to say, I am figuring out how the current supply chain works, we have two cooks who can prepare everything on the menu, and one experienced waiter. This is a major staff cut, which just means a lot of work for me. The idea is to keep the restaurant afloat until the NEW restaurant can come to fruition. We’re changing the focus entirely, moving away from the relatively fancy fare to simpler stuff: all day breakfast, burgers and pies. Did you know you can’t really get a decent Western breakfast anywhere in Beijing? Specifically, pancakes and waffles! Same with pie?! So the new menu will have full breakfast, specialty burgers, and seasonal pies. My first task will be to keep Connections running AS IT IS until the new investors are ready and the new direction is ready, then we can close down the restaurant, renovate the kitchen and interior, print up new marketing, and “turn over a new leaf” as it were. This blog will soon be filled with excruciating detail about the whole “running a restaurant” schtick.

More is going on now with the Swiss helicopter people. New/additional investors have been found.

The idea behind Epiphany (that idealistic one where we want to imbue passion into the musical souls of the masses of musically educated but passionless Chinese through social music making and performance thing) has been shifted a little; we are out of money, don’t have the original venue we wanted (though I think we have a new and even better venue, right behind Connections and on the 10,000 sqm roof of the complex), but we’re moving forward. I think the idea now is to find other people who do have money and steer them in the proper direction.

A new company was formed to handle some “Remote Medicine,” whatever that is; apparently it might be relevant to something one of Maria’s good friends does, so we will be in touch with him.

Cow Farm! Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, I think we want fresh milk, yogurt, and cheese…

FTC Art and Gen-Next (the young, urban, born post 1980s, Beijing artists thing) is moving along nicely. I’ve got all the separate bits working now, the only thing left to do is tweak and perfect the silent bidding system. As I look at the scale of this project I’m doing for my father, it’s surprisingly how large it’s gotten. In one of the older posts I broke down all the different bits of it, but suffice it to say, I might be undercharging him for only 700 USD. Either way. This will be online soon, expect its announcement here. This may be the only place online to find the modern art of Beijing for sale…and I’m not talking about a specific person’s personal site; we’re actually gathering and representing currently 8 but soon to be many more artists and their works.

Oh, and I guess I’ll be doing something very similar with fashion…? I have very little details about that right now.

Maria will also be taking a trial class at BiMBA on Thursday. She’s going to study for the GMAT all day tomorrow, that’s happening relatively soon.

Well this post is long enough, the original idea was just to introduce expat-blog, so I’m going to end with that.

As an aside…I’m wondering if I should re-vamp my tagging system…

I like the idea that this will serve as a record of what Sean and I accomplish, especially in China.� Right now, though, the accomplishments are pretty boring.� I got visas.� I completed my continuing legal education requirements.� I took my 401k rollover paperwork to the post office, again.� I did a GMAT practice quiz at the Arcadia public library and politely asked some makeup-wearing pre-teens to keep it down.� (I wasn’t sure why the 8 other people sitting closer didn’t take it upon themselves to do this, but when I left I saw that most of them were wearing earplugs and apparently watching videos on their laptops.� These did not appear to be particularly educational videos, either.)

I also like the idea that the blog will be a kind of online diary: recording my thoughts, serving as a vehicle for me to practice writing, helping me work through ideas and plans.� This possible goal is in part harpooned by the fact that an online diary is not private, and particularly by the fact that Sean will read it.� Is there any more obvious subject for a woman to treat in her diary than her gentleman friend? Of course, some issues are fair game: e.g. my thoughts on the immediately relevant question of what health insurance plan Sean and I should secure before leaving the country.� I may well treat the readership to this a bit later. 8)

The most appealing goal to me, though, is as a form of one-to-many communication (…or showing off?).� To the extent anyone cares what we’re up to in China, I can inform the masses without unnecessary duplication, merely by posting my amazing photos and describing my amazing experiences here.� Yeah, not so amazing to call Toyota dealerships to set up appointments to get quotes on what they’ll give me for my Corolla.� (Maybe I can get my picture taken with the winning dealer and post it here!!)

I admit that I’m already enjoying the benefit of additional Sean-insights.� (What did he write?� What on earth was he talking about?� Was that for real???)� Will he and I learn significantly more about each other from the blog?� (A slightly horrifying suggestion, actually–he tells YOU things he doesn’t tell ME.)� Eh.� I’ll take what I can get.

In the meantime, I acknowledge that the blog, like everything else right now, is allowed to be transitional.� Not that I mind being unemployed one little bit, but I can imagine improvements on the situation otherwise.

But this does mean that my girlfriend is no longer here, and though it was more poignant when I slept on a California King sized bed on my own, the point is nevertheless deftly tipped now that I’m on a Queen sized bed; I don’t like sleeping on my own. Not that I actually really noticed; I was too tired to. Maybe that’s like my own personal sort of subconscious defense against loneliness; I tired myself out so that I can sleep without noticing a thing.

We spoke on the phone a few times throughout the day. I requested that she let me know how her flights were going so that I’d know she made it there safely and on time. She did. She is now happily (hopefully) in Rhode Island, visiting her sister and twin nephews for the first time. The nephews, not the sister. She didn’t feel it would be very restful and/or fun the time she spends there; I hope she is mistaken. I head off to NYC this Thursday to join her in Ohio on Saturday.

I feel as if I’ve been losing a bit of focus as far as what this blog is all supposed to be about. There’s not much of China in these early posts. And though I call them early, if I were so good as to maintain a proper writing regiment, I’ll have just over five weeks of posts before we’re even in China. That’s a lot of context and background. I suppose that’s a good thing, but it makes me wonder about what the heck I’m writing. I suppose I should just accept the fact that up until some later point, this will just be a blog; a normal, every day, blog. And hope that in some unspecified amount of time later, hopefully five weeks and zero days today, it will become that much more interesting because I’m sure the day to day rambling of me doesn’t make for particularly good reading.

To the future. To the future r-expat(s).

We will be going for a number of reasons: business opportunities, personal and career development, school, rest and relaxation. We intend to go there with little to no knowledge of what we’re getting into, while there figure it all out, and return, at our leisure, of our own volition, a huge success in every possible way. It will be an adventure.

I had been playing around with the idea of having some way to keep track of all that’s happening, all that will happen, etc. I do have a good bit of programming background of my own so I had thought that it might be fun to develop my own CMS/Blogging software. But I have no time. And Blogger has treated me reasonably well throughout the years, so I figured, why not.

My girlfriend will also be writing and posting. Our writing styles should be massively different, so that will make for entertaining reading I expect. I also think we’re immature enough that we’d comment snidely on each other posts with all manners of backhanded comments and sleights of verbage.

I will also make sure to introduce ourselves properly, in full, later. For now, I think this is good, as an opening statement. Not too short, not too long, not too grandiose, but just eloquent enough as to be somewhat annoying, and encapsulating in so many words what could have just as easily have been summed up as: I am very excited about this new adventure on which I, we, are about to embark.