However, with the start of a couple of new projects involving additional online content creation, my hope is that I can once again pick up where I’ve always left off, and give this blog the attention it deserves. There’s a lot of history here, and I wouldn’t want to lose it or devalue its importance. I have been pretty good about updating the Milestones though; that at least is up to date.

I also think my father came to visit at some point, most likely in June, though it’s confusing because they were originally supposed to come in May. I had even bought both he and our doctor round trip airplane tickets and hotel reservations, all at the very last minute, and had to cancel them, all at the very last minute again, only to be told a couple of weeks later, at the very last minute, that they need round trip airplane tickets and hotel reservations again, only to find out upon landing that the doctor ran off with his ex-wife, never to be seen again until the end of the trip, and the wonderful hotel room he found for them in Times Square needs to be canceled and replaced with the Yonkers Roadway Motel, because my father is just like that. Oh and did I mention, all a the very last minute. They also had a massive agenda of speaking with editors of Nature, CDC scientists, IP lawyers, and innumerable other matters relating to Maria and my ultimate self employment, non of which got addressed. Not that I’m bitter, or complaining, but there’s an unfortunate growing part of me that wonders why I keep giving these people additional chances to take advantage then disregard me.

But that is not the point of this post, nor is my grandfather’s funeral, which Maria and I went to. It was nice being back in China, to visit that is. I think we’ve both decided that China is best kept for the visitors, and that, even for long periods of time, it’s infinitely better to visit than live in that country. We accomplished a lot while we were there as well, including getting her refund from business school, something that involved a literal scavenger hunt for departmental seals. They had said to budget 3 or so hours for the entire process, because it required us to move from one department to another, handing them one thing after the other, getting their seals collected on a piece of paper to ultimately trade for another piece of paper that said she’d withdrawn. It’s like, in this day and age, hard to imagine that the MBA office’s computers weren’t connected to the library, IT, or student affairs. I’m sure I’ve ranted about this all before somewhere, but come on people. More on all of that later, again, that’s not the point of this post.

The point is, that we had a lovely long weekend in Ohio for the Fourth.

Perhaps for the last time, at least until we decide to keep a nocturnal schedule, and the thought of which has been sounding more and more appealing what with these very warm summer days in NYC, we drove through the night again. It was actually my last day at work, but I’d rather not get into any of that right now. Suffice it to say we were free to go where we wanted, for as long as we wanted, barring BAR study, the only limiting factor. Part ways through New Jersey, the car all of a sudden got really loud. We had noticed that it was running louder and louder ever since our trip up to Vermont, but this was out of hand. No check engine light though, no handling issues, so we just pressed one, because, well, what could we do? We could postpone our trip, but that’s no fun, and we had to be there by Friday afternoon (we left Thursday evening).

You see, we had gotten invited to Maria’s best friend’s 4th of July party, on the afternoon of the 1st, to view some fireworks, eat some good food, take in some good company. She had even invited me, something which for rather obscure reasons moved me an awful lot. It felt nice to have someone consider me in their plans, and I was touched that she thought of me. We got in, effectively slept all day, though in the middle of napping I went to get the car fixed at the local garage. It turns out the pipe connecting the engine to the muffler had rusted through, a quick cut, measure, and weld fixed it, quite cheaply I might add. Then there was the actual party, at which they had an above ground pool, which we didn’t use that day but the next, after playing cards and board games. There was breakfast with the family at Panera, dinner at home, driving around town and the countryside. We saw a movie. I always like it when I visit Maria’s home town. I might like it enough to live there. The people are so nice, the community as well, and it makes me wish for a more stable, permanent lifestyle, one in which I can actually be a part of a community, know the people around me. I’ve rented all my life, and briefly at that, so I’ve never felt that kind of connection, and SLC is know for not having a “community,” even going so far as to have open forums on why there is no “community” at SLC. So may it’s this sense of being out of place, out of sync with the people around me, that makes me envious of the lives of those who have that connection. Maria’s best friend has her husband, their beautiful daughter, and their entire family around them and all their friends. They have a beautiful house and yard, and a garden with vegetables that hopefully this next time we visit, we’d be able to partake from. They’re renovating their garage. There’s a lot that’s enviable about all of that.

I’ve switched themes again, to more properly reflect the colors of Fall that are all around me here in Beijing. Thankfully though I caught it; it’s already basically Winter and a brisk cold and wind have settled in. For a while though the leaves on the trees were a bright and deep red and yellow, falling with every gust of wind. I had thought that if I had the time to pick together the necessary photos and color palettes I’d code the site to automatically switch depending on the season, to reflect the seasons, or perhaps if I had the proper photos to depict all the different moods of someone’s weather, then those. But that feels like a chore, and more effort than I’d want to expend at the moment.

We’ve been taking some lovely photos though of the season, though most of them are on Maria’s phone. I hope to find the time to get them off and onto here soon.

Let’s see, my other sites are all up and running now: photos, music, blog, portfolio. I should add a proper link to all of them from here. And though our server in China has somehow stopped serving up sites, there’s lots of work on there that I’ve been working on. Hopefully that technical issue will get resolved soon, though it’s actually beyond my abilities to diagnose at the moment.

The point of this post though, despite general updates about whatever and anything that’s been going on, I still need to find a new project to focus on. We’ve taken delivery of my grandmother’s old piano and I’ve been able to practice playing more and that’s been quite fulfilling. Though last night for the first time one of the neighbors came up and knocked on our door, saying that it was too late and too loud to play. I suppose it was quite late, but there’s a part of me that still prefers a later schedule in general over an earlier one. But the days have been very pretty, and I’ve taken some nice long walks with Maria. So despite not having gotten much sleep in general, I’m staying up all these days so that I wouldn’t be on a different schedule from her. Her school’s been quite busy, the first semester almost coming to an end, her midterms finishing up soon. I spend my days spending as much time as I can with her, travelling to and from her school, then during the times when she’s in class working on my little “projects,” such as they are. Again, I need to find a new one.

My visa woes have finally come to a head. I have 8 days until I need to actually leave the country again, unable to get another extension, the only reasonable recourse to finally get my working visa so that I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving the country again for at least a year. Those prospects are a little bit spotty, but they should work out. The only difficulty is that I need to actually return to the US, which is something I’m not looking forward to. I’m thinking maybe of heading to NYC instead of LA, see some friends, get in some sights. We had thought that maybe it’ll be possible to just go to Hong Kong instead but according to their website, you need to go to your country of residence to process this new visa. And the worst of it is that as soon as I get this new work visa, pay for it and all and bring it all back into China, I’ll have to turn it in for a residency permit thus canceling my work visa. It’s a really pointless process actually, but one that you nevertheless have to follow. Sigh, we’ll know soon though. I think I’m going to make the executive decision that today is the last day I’m going to fret on this. I doubt I can go anywhere but the States, I’m decently sure I can go to NYC, so I guess I’m going to NYC.

I’d forgotten my mother’s birthday also, the 5th, which means that soon it’ll be the 15th.

i would like to comment a bit on the odd day to day expenses that occur in th is country. now it is very cheap, unreasonably so even, to eat out, buy groceries, cook, find entertainment, see friends, etc., so that in general, one does not actually need to make a lot to live very well. we buy massive bags worth of fresh produce for less than 30rmb, all the groceries we could want for less than 50rmb, plus fruit and freshly prepared cold chinese salads and we’re looking at no more than the equivalent of 20 dollars and we’re set for at least a week. by some estimate, one only needs a quarter of that to live very comfortably in this country. but then, there’s rent.

now maybe i’m unreasonable, but i have a certain standard that i find hard to give up, especially when it concerns the place that i call home, the bathroom that i do my business in, and the kitchen that i prepare meals for the ones i care about in. you can rent a place very cheaply, no more than 30 dollars a month, but it will be underground, is a literal room, have a shared bathroom with no gauranteed hot water, no gaurantee of windows, and definitely okitchen htough you can bring your own electric stove and many people do. that’s the bottom of the pole.

and then there’s the chinese style apartments which are, for most intents and purposes alright, but shoddy, feeling like they’re falling apart, and they are, with no regard for the common spaces of the buildings meaning you can be on the highest floor and all the lights will be out in the hallways so you’ll feel like you’re living in a cave. and the bathrooms, lord save me from the bathrooms. so that’s like, the middle, wh ich, unfortunately, from a standards point of view, i find difficult to accept.

now i realize this might make me seem like a snob or something, but for the same reason that i never understood why people don’t care about the quality of their hotel rooms while on vacation based on the flimsy pretense that they don’t plan to stay in that that often didn’t and doesn’t make sense to me i mean, you need a place to stay right, some place comfortable because what happens if you’re sick or too drunk you don’t want to passout in a trash heap i can’t come to terms with an apartment that i dread the thougt of taking a shower in, which is most chinese apartments. but that makes up the middle tier as far as quality goes.

then there are those places meant for foreigners to stay in, built from the ground up for them, and are of decent quality. noe i say decent only because even they could use a good bit of work. one common complaint is the abundance of mold on the walls of even the most expensive, and i do mean most expensive as these places can run for close to western prices, of places just still feel like they are falling apart, and they are. but, you can find places that will satisfy my standards, but again, they’re expensive.

which brings us to the point that i find myself in an odd employment state. you see, i’m no longer. the foreigner who’s willing to relocate and work in beijing, i’m the foreigner who’s already here and is looking for a job, with the major difference being that while the former has an allure of self sacrifice, and thus the appropriate compensation to go along with what ever jobs may fall under that category, the latter does not, and will pay close to absolutely nothing for work that in any other country will earn me a decent living. bottom line, i can’t make more than 700 dollars a month doing full time programming work in this god forsaken country. now that isn’t actually bad by chinese standards, and were my only goal to pay for our day to day expenses, i’m golden, but i need to pay for rent, and i need a place that i am comfortable taking a shower in, and that’s where the conflict comes into play, namely i for the moment just, can’t.

and the irony of it all, my father just got a new place in beijing and it meets our standards, and is cheaper by far than anything else out there we’ve found, but is in the wrong part of town, and i think that makes all the difference.

but the plan is to continue searching, both for a job and an apartment, and i think we’re going to venture way the far out of town to a place that’s still subway accessible, and easilly accessible might i add, but hopefully very inexpensive by virtue of it being far away, and we might be lucky out there.

let’s see, other problems that plague the sean. he needs to leave again out of the country by july 15 to get on his last entry into the country. and this will be the last one as his visa expires at the end of august, as in proper expires and he will need to go back to the united states to get a new one, which he really does not want to. for reasons beyond his countrol and knowledge and patience to sort through his working visa still hasn’t come through, and neither had maria’s, but she no longer needs to worry because a) she’s going back to the states anyways and b) she will get a student visa through tsinghua. the sean’s plan though is to get on his last entry, as cheaply as possible, then at the last mi nute switch while in country to a 90 day single entry visa, which he knows he can, so he cwn stay in the country until the end of november by which time hopefully some other, better solution would have presented itself. at the moment he doesn’t care which: his father comes throug, he gets employed elsewhere, or he pays somebody 1000 dollars and they give him the visa in that shady, underhanded, sort of grey area kind of way. it really doesn’t matter.

back to i here, i think. i had also planned on joining maria in the states and nyc for her internship this summer, but the feasibility of it is minimal. the expenses unfortunatly just far outweigh the gain, and if i go, i have to plan on staying, which is a decision i’m not yet ready to make. i definitely want to be here when maria starts her school so if i head back to the states it will be after that so no point making the expense now. startup expenses in general back in the states is also just in general prohibitive so even if i wanted to, maybe the best i can do is go back to los angeles which actually doesn’t sound that appealing. i’m kinda holding out that china will still work out in a bit way and we’ll all make our personal fortunes here and change the world for the better.

which at least there’s still a chance of, and having lost most of my steam for blogging, i will end here by saying that no matter what, the sean is trying to be optimistic, and hey, he hadn’t thought of this but maybe he and maria can get married; that’ll solve his visa problems.

oh and the restaurant is a complete bust incidentally. to summarize in the quickest way possible, there’s been management issues from the get go, the owners no longer like each other, for some reason one half viewed my desire to no longer be their full time employee as a sign that they should exit the business as well so they gave my dad some time to find someone to buy them out, and since it obviously didn’t happen fast enough they’ve been threatening to close down the business and then wanted to buy us out which, well, hey, seemed like quite a good deal actually because we were done with the stupid thing anyway and didn’t want to have anything to do with it and if you’ll listen to my father about it, he’s convinced the entire thing was a conspiracy to get the entire business by the other half owners at a greatly depreciated value by driving me out, driving the restaurant down, then lording over us the fact that they have more money to convince us to sell out to them, but things really came to a head when, afraid that they might steal our business licenses my father put up fake copies on the walls and, lo and behold, the next day they were stolen from us, and then when maria and i went to go check our mail because we’re using the restaurant as our mailing address because it’s convenient we find that they had changed the locks on us and were no longer able to get in, and that they had fired all the staff and closed the restaurant without telling us! what is wrong with these people? they were just in the middle of negotiating how to buy our half our when all of a sudden, chaos. so now maria and i have no place to get our mail which is a) a shame and b) just inconvenient as far as timing goes because we’re expecting her all important actual enrollment confirmation packet from tsinghua which should also have the confirmation that the chinese government is going to pay for all her tuition and housing and give her a monthly stipend to live on in. that was sarcastic by the way, though it’ll be cool if it happened that way, but we are actually waiting for this packet and it’s being sent to the restaurant and we’re not sure how to get it anymore because these people are insane!

…

so here’s to hoping it all comes together, heh, and that those we’ve wronged or disappointed in the past may forgive and move forward with us towards a brighter and better future.

Maria had a tough day trying to get her car sold today. More disheartening I guess actually, but I think the dealer is trying to con her out of the actual value of the car. She’s got a couple of people interested in third party sales, and at least a bottom line figure from one of the dealers, granted lower than both of us anticipated and lower than KBB suggested, so we shall see. Not much time left to get it done though, though, as pointed out, we could always just leave it at my father’s place.

And she needs to call the dentist tomorrow! This is my reminder to you Maria though you won’t actually read it I don’t think ;)

We bought our one way tickets to China on Sunday. Yes, one way. I had a short discussion about it at work today with a co-worker, and there’s something psychologically freeing about purchasing a one way anything; a one way train, bus, airplane, etc. ticket. It’s like, “getting out of dodge,” heading out on an adventure. A much firmer break from this particular era of my, our, lives, into the next. That’s what it’s always been, and always was, but to have actual “one way” tickets makes it that much almost physically meaningful.

We still need to purchase our health insurance, but that doesn’t seem to require too much hurry. And even with the best laid plans, I’ll be just a little bit short in my quest to be completely debt free. Not bad considering. I think I’ll re-consolidate the remainder and just leave it be. At least it’s no longer credit card debt. Feels like a good load off my shoulders, a good way to move to China.

We’ve also finished a bit of preliminary packing. We bought two big check-in style suitcases and managed to pack them full of Maria stuff. At our current estimate, there will be at least three more equally sized suitcases needed before we have all the Maria stuff packed. I will need one myself, making for a total of six check-ins, which we can’t actually do and so will take up my father on his offer to bring some luggage over for us when he returns to China on the 25th. We’ll also both have our laptops and carry-ons of course. I’m trying to wrap my mind around what to do with my desktop computer though. Granted, I’d like one in China, and if I don’t bring the one I have, I’ll have to purchase another. But it’s so a pain in the ass to try to bring over. My current thinking is that I might take it completely apart into its respective bits, pack said bits up well, and put it in my carry-on and purchase a new case in China; the case is the largest part…This will disappoint Craig a bit though as he’s been eying it from the moment our plans to leave the country leaked.

Ah and part of why I’m just a little bit short of successfully paying off ALL of my debt is that, and I didn’t know this, but my work’s payroll is actually on time, unlike all other companies I’ve worked for who operated a week late. I had been expecting my last paycheck, plus a week, but I guess that week’s gone and spent already. Minor wrinkle I’m sure.

I’ve been playing around with the concept of “legacy” in my head a bit lately, the most tangible form of which relates to work. I want to leave something behind, something meaningful. More than a stack of junk stuffed in the corner of my father’s garage, more than boxes of books at my mother’s, more than a chunk of programming code. I want it to actually all be meaningful, beneficial.

At this moment, I’d like to invite YOU ALL to come and visit :D

We successfully got our Visas, good for 60 days at a time, 4 times a year, so effectively we can stay there for 8 months even if we really mess up our longer term Visas; we’ll just have to leave and come back in to the country every two months. Supposedly it’s good enough to even just go to Hong Kong and back. Or I’m thinking we can use this as an excuse to take a vacation every two months. Although, ideally still, we should have year long Visas that can be renewed without leaving the country. It’s just hard not thinking about vacation! Even though I’m desperately POOR! But my credit’s doing real good now that I’ve gotten most of my debts paid off.

This countdown may actually be a little in accurate now, and there may not be anything I can do about it. My father would like us to travel back to China with him. He gets to the states on the 15th, and he’s “thinking” of returning “most likely” on the 23rd. Completely uncertain though! Apparently, and I don’t think I’ve ever had to do this before, I wonder if it’s a new policy, but we’ll need to be registered with the local police station when we get there, and it’ll be easier with my father, which I don’t doubt. I just don’t want to delay our departure anymore than I have to. By that point I won’t have a job anymore so it’s not like I can work some more and make some more money. We’d have finished our last US vacation as well. We’ll basically be completely ready but sitting on our hands still. Not a very pleasant proposition I don’t think.

Our “farewell” party will also be next weekend, sometime. It was originally supposed to be this weekend, but I guess that didn’t pan out. Hopefully, it’ll be at my boss’ home, with some work friends, and the few friends I’ve left in LA. Maria’s going to be seeing some of her last friends next week, and I think tomorrow we’re heading down to Orange County to see one of them. It almost doesn’t feel real.

I’ll need to see my mother, at some point, before I leave. I’m thinking next week, during the week may be appropriate. It’s all wrapping up really, and I don’t have much exciting to say at the moment. Maria and I’s conversations are continually and exceptionally wonderful slash insightful. I can’t really wait until we get to China and we have a whole new slew of stuff to talk about.