If blogging is a little slow for the next little while, here’s why:

Lilia Eden was born 7 weeks early at 9:21pm on May 23! She’s 4lbs 10.5oz, 18.5 inches. Jessica is doing great, despite the unexpected emergency surgery, and Lilia is in the NICU getting stronger every day. If you’re Facebook friends with either of us, then you can see photos.

We’re aiming to move back to China in September, but blogging will be less frequent (but not totally absent) until then.

P.S. – Chinese name suggestions most welcome! But we make no promises. Her family name is 陆。

P.P.S. – As tempting as it is, we wont be turning this into a baby photo blog. We’ll keep writing China stuff here, and just make a different blog for the baby photos! :)

Someone entered us in the 2008 China Blog Awards. Voting ends on the 31st and the holidays are coming, so now’s about the last change to give us a boost! Please go here and click the little plus (+) sign.

And if you really like clicking plus signs and are feeling particularly magnanimous, you can also vote for these nice people with good China blogs:

• Xinjiang: Far West China
• Frog in a Well wasn’t entered, but they’re good, too.

Stupid blog stuff
The blog’s been down a lot the last few days. So 烦得死去活来！ I don’t have time or know-how to fix it, but thankfully we have friends here who are smarter than me. Hopefully we’ll do all the upgrades and maintenance and stuff that I’ve successfully(?) avoided so far out of fear of messing everything up, and things will go back to normal — I guess this thing just couldn’t stay in 2003 forever. For now it’s limping along; if you get a blank page with a weird error message, that’s why.

Photos!
From today – of all the $0.50 fried noodles in Tianjin, her’s are my favourite:

From Sunday before last – a bit of colour in the morning commute:

Riding that close to all the cars is normal.

[June 11] As you can see, our blog is having “issues.” Our friend and my former computer genius of a roommate Greg (formerly my roommate, still currently a computer genius) is working on getting our Chinese characters back and getting rid of that error message at the top. Once he does, I’m afraid you’ll get daily posts for at least a week or two, along with a few photo galleries. This server move has made our blog a little constipated.

If you’re sick of checking back here all the time and seeing this same dumb post and NO new photos, then look down on the left hand column and put your e-mail in the little box and hit “Subscribe.” That way you don’t have to check here every day and you’ll get an e-mail when something new is posted… assuming that subscription thing still works, of course. Hopefully we’ll be back in business soon!

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There’s been some fun and interesting stuff the last couple days, but we’re in the middle of changing web hosts. I’m waiting to post until it’s finished… hopefully done today or tomorrow. Greg is actually doing it for us, since I’m 有一点笨 when it comes to stuff like that. If we disappear for a bit, that’s why.

We camp on the Great Wall this weekend!

In case you didn’t notice, CHL is now publicly accessible. Please link and e-mail all you want.

Here’s the one important part: We do not want to be accidentally mistaken as potentially troublesome by people of consequence. Our intentions are explicitly apolitical. In order to not be misunderstood, it is important that people don’t associate our names or url with potentially troublesome terminology. So please link to us, but keep all that in mind. And please don’t use our last names. If you have any questions about all this, you can send us an e-mail.

So yeah, no more logging in. Happy? If you experience any issues with leaving comments or whatever, please let me know.

Tomorrow we take the kids (Koreans and Taiwanese) downtown for some sightseeing at Stanley park. Tough job…

Made it back just in time for Julia’s graduation. Here’s a photo with her date to the grad banquet/cruise/breakfast that the school does as an alternative to prom. Brian’s a Korean guy who was on her South Africa trip.

It’s Canada day, so the paper is filled with things that are supposed to make Canada look good and distinct, like this quote from Jane Fonda (yes, that’s right),

When I go to Canada, I feel this what the world should be like.

Toques, Tim Horton’s donuts, and polar bears made the top 5 “Reasons to Love Canada” list. Wayne Gretzky was #9 – right above salmon. I’ll refrain from facetious comments regarding national identity crises and inferiority complexes.

We really do like it here. The weather is sunny but not sweaty, it’s all green and tree’d, quiet, spacious… and I’m talking about Surrey, B.C. The locals disagree, but perspective is very relative: driving into Surrey from the airport I thought, “Geez, this place is so… undeveloped!” It looked like frontier territory or something, compared to Yonghe. We’ve been hanging out with extended family that’s here for Julia’s grad, nice and relaxing before the craziness of the ESL program starts on Monday.

In other news, CHL will soon go public – meaning no more annoying logging in and all that. I just have to clean up a few more things and make sure I don’t accidentally mess it all up in the process.

Look to your right – on the screen, not in real life – just above the weather (which is still showing a moon when it’s sunny here… argh!). We just added Chinese take-out!, where we’ll post fun things to say in Chinese – hopefully almost every day. Now you can practice on all your Chinese friends and co-workers! (And if you offend them, they’ll never let you know! =)

- You can leave replies to each phrase by clicking the date and time.
- Clicking the pronunciation will take you to a very cool online Chinese dictionary that has audio files of each word.
- To see all the Chinese take-out! phrases, click “Chinese take-out” in the Categories list in the left-hand sidebar.
- Starting now, you can mouseover characters like this: 我爱你 to see the pronunciation.
- If you are seeing computer symbols instead of Chinese, you need to either update your browser, enable East Asian languages, and/or ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox!

For the inaugural phrase we picked “ma3ma3 hu1hu1″ (ma-ma hoo-hoo), for no other reason than it just sounds really funny when you say it. We were in Wen2-di2′s car (yes, that’s pronounced “Wendy,” and he hates it) with some others and were trying to catch the conversation when one of them used this phrase and it made us laugh. Lao3 Zhao4 also used it the day we were getting my hair cut. Anyway, there will be plenty more to come. And we take requests!

We just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2 – much thanks to Justin at WebbleYou! If you had trouble logging on earlier, that’s why.

The previously mentioned rush of inspiration was only good for about 4 pages of that paper; I’m not sure if I should feel guilty about the other 8 or not.

Either way, we’ve got a little breathing room now to get our lives in order. Moving to Taipei + two weeks of Winter Camp + Hong Kong + grad papers =’d messing up our lives. Now – for the first time since we left West Texas in August – we can start a sane routine that should last for more than two weeks! It’s nice to actively and routinely engage our spiritual and married relationships, clean our apartment, stay on top of our assignments (more reading in the park!), get organized with the Mandarin learning, learn the local markets, get to know the food stand owners we frequent beyond their names, and hang out with our new Taiwanese friends! We do have time for all that now – this month even.

Some little things:
- new photos, video, and audio (on the photos and video pages)!
- If you haven’t yet ditched Internet Exploder for Firefox, now’s your chance. Firefox is safer, more secure, easier to use, faster… and CHL works better in it! =)

Greetings to all our friends and family and welcome to our blog! Please come back often and leave comments… Taiwan is a long way from home!

This site is created and designed to give our friends and family as big a window as we can into our China adventures. We want you guys to be as much a part of our experiences as possible. In addition to the stories and pictures, we’ll also occasionally post downloadable audio and video (once we have some worth posting!).

(This post updated 09 July 22.)