Just so everyone knows, the earthquake down in Chengdu today did not affect us this far north.
The Johnsons are back in Xining packing and re-packing and tying down the fort (or whatever strange metaphor you'd like to use for such things). We were all so exhausted today I doubt we would have EVEN noticed any residual shakes in the terra firma.
Let's be in prayer for those who were closer to the epicenter. With that, we'll see (some of) you VERY soon...
We'll be moving from Jianzha back to Xining one week from tomorrow! Then it will be a short 2 weeks until we plane back to the States from Beijing.
In lieu of a lot of changes and activity during this month of May I have decided I am going to be taking a hiatus from blogging. I am not sure if it will be a short hiatus or a long hiatus, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. I am going to be reflecting on the "journey" thusfar, especially over these past 3 years. After being somewhat of a "spectacle" during this time period in a different country, I am looking forward to a bit of a sabbatical from being in the public eye so much. In other words I am building a little privacy back into my daily life.
It might not last for long. Thanks for checkin' in. I'll let you know when the yeti surfaces again...
The girls, Anna and Sarah, have had a bad case of "la duzi" lately, otherwise known as diarrhea. The other night Anna came into the living room and with a very sad face said to Christa, "Mommy, I had diarrhea again."
Christa replied sympathetically, "I know, Anna. Tomorrow, Beth [a co-worker friend] and I are going to look into it."
Anna paused a second and then her eyes got as big as saucers, "What? You're going to look into my poo-poo place?"
I about died of laughter. The beautifully literal mind of a child.
It's not uncommon to lose electricity for a day or two in China without any explanation, especially out where we live.
But here's an interesting power outage story that ends in pecans...
Last month I went to pay the electric bill for our apartment. (You've heard about going "paperless". Well, China has this concept down already. They don't use paper; unfortunately they also don't use the internet or any other digital format for paying bills--at least not where I live, other parts of China may work differently. You won't ever receive a bill in the mail for utilities nor will you receive any notification that a bill is due in paper form. You just have to know where to pay the bills and more importantly WHEN...)
So I went to pay in March, but was told I didn't owe anything. OK. No worries.
So on the 9th of April I went back to pay my electric bill (at the bank) only to be told that I needed to come back on the 10th through the 20th to pay it. Frustrating, but not uncommon. I resolved to return.
Of course I quickly forgot and on April 21st at 9 a.m. our electricity was suddenly just GONE. At first I didn't make the "lack of payment" connection. Since power had been out at various times during the week I just assumed that it was a normal outage. Since it is nearly impossible to tell during the daylight hours who has and/or does not have electricity, we assumed that our whole complex was cut off.
In the meantime I went and paid our bill which was a whopping $5 (US). When it got dark outside we noticed that some of the windows in the apartment complex had LIGHT emanating from them. Electric lighting that is. Hmmmm. Christa got curious and began asking our neighbors if they had electricity. Many of them did (while a few didn't). A friendly half-Tibetan neighbor took Christa under her wing and started making further inquiries. She asked around and finally called the electric company for us...
Turns out, paying your bill on the 21st of the month IS a bit too late and our power was cut off. So, after a candle-lit evening, I had to wake up early the next morning, walk down to the electric company and pay the fee $1.50 (US) to get our electricity turned back on. It was the first time in my life I had my power turned off because I was negligent in paying my bill. Oh, the SHAME! It was quickly fixed thankfully. That afternoon we had power once more.
Our friendly neighbor also had a nice chat with Christa and gave her some pecans as a parting gift. When Christa asked where the pecans had come from (since she had never seen them here) our neighbor replied, "America."
(But she had to import them all the way from Xining. Turns out you can't buy imported pecans in J-town. But, man, they have a stringent 0-tolerance policy when it comes to tardy bill pay!)
On Christa's birthday a few days ago it looked like this outside...
Warm! Very warm. I was digging trenches over the weekend in a short-sleeved T-shirt.
But this morning when we woke up all the surrounding mountains were COVERED in snow. (Yep, I snapped a picture of it, but the camera battery is dead so you'll have to take my word for it.) I feel like putting some Christmas music on and starting a cozy fire in the middle of the living room.
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Well, a contract has been signed for our new library space. They will hopefully begin tiling it this week and putting new doors in. Sometime today our staff will begin boxing up all the books in order to make the move from the old building to the new. This is a huge answer to our vertical requests. Thank you!
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Sarah got a haircut last week. It suits her to a tee...
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Here is a family shot and a picture of Christa's birthday cake. I DID NOT bake this cake. It was a nice gesture from our teammates. I DID make cookies with the girls for Christa's birthday. They were yummy.
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5 weeks, people! 5 weeks!
This beautiful young lady (left) is celebrating a birthday today...
Wishing my wife all the best today and in her new year!
(note: I couldn't find a photo of Christa where she wasn't hugging someone in the family. That says something about her I think.)
The sun comes out and I pull off my fleece jacket and wonder if I really needed to wear my thermals underneath my jeans today. It is mid-April after all. A cloud rolls in, covering the sun, and I can feel my arms getting chilled beneath my long-sleeved T-shirt. The fleece goes back on. What's up with this weather?
The radiators in our apartment were turned off in early March, but someone forgot to turn up the temperature outside. After the sun goes down (and on the frequent cloudy days of late), our concrete apartment turns into a cooler pretty quickly. If your feet or nose get cold at this time of day they will stay that way until you hop into bed for the night. I am thankful for the hot chocolate we have on hand. It is technically spring now I think.
The girls have found a tree near our apartment that they can climb. Anna is proud of the fact that she can climb near to the top -- a good six or seven feet above my head. It makes me nervous. The daily attention we receive in our town is bad enough, but our kids have to make it worse by climbing a tree. As I watch Anna with broken arm scenarios looping through my head, I hear the locals asking each other over and over again, "Twins? Are they twins?" All of these foreign kids look the same I guess. They smile and gawk at the little white birds up in the leafy treetops.
Zacchaeus, you come down!
This afternoon we looked at a another potential rental property for our library. We think this might be the one. As you may remember, the place we were renting had some "foundational" issues. I'm not speaking figuratively when I say these issues were foundational. The floor was very literally caving in. We condemned it and have been looking for a place ever since then. I wish I had some photos on hand to show you. If we can get this new place rented that will be very good. It will keep us a good deal busier during our last month here in J-town.
Christa has been visiting her Chinese Mus. friend in town, Sophia, pretty often. Sophia is expecting a baby boy during the first part of May so Christa is hoping we'll still be here when the baby actually comes. Sophia will be giving birth at the hospital here in J-town which has a good reputation supposedly, but makes a foreigner like myself cringe just thinking about it. Christa gave Sophia a childbirth book (in Chinese) a few weeks ago since Sophia will not have any kind of preparation (childbirth classes, doctor consults, etc.) before the baby arrives. Epidurals? I don't think so...
I've been tied up with other preparations lately. The girls and I have been scheming and plotting in lieu of Christa's birthday on Thursday (17th). We have a few things lined up, but it will be pretty low-key.
Thought of the day: Tibetan clothing just looks cool. I like the long robes, the colorful patterns, the yak's wool lining, and the curious faces staring at me from beneath it all.
This is an amazing book...
It is a book I am sure I will re-read soon, but much more slowly. Some of the expressions and depictions of Christian spirituality contained in these pages touched me more than probably 80 or 90 percent of the books I've read from the "Christian Living" section of most Christian bookstores. The writing, of course, plays a big part in my appreciation of this, but the ideas (philosophy, beauty) also struck a deep chord in me. I would often find myself stopping to ponder a paragraph or a sentence...and then I'd go back and re-read it.
Yeah, it's golden.
Against my better judgment I filled out a bracket for the NCAA tourney this year.
And what do you know, I won! (Here's how:)
Granted I was competing against only 3 other people (for "a plate of ribs" at our favorite pub in Edmonds), but still, it's an accomplishment. I correctly picked Kansas to win it all over Memphis. I utilized the ignorance-is-bliss strategy and basically just picked from instinct. Actually, my bracket is pretty ugly with all the "misses", but hey points is points and they added up. I didn't watch a game all season and couldn't watch any games during the tournament since it is not televised in China. But it paid off. It was completely stress-free.
I am looking forward to collecting my winnings sometime in June. In the words of my daughter Sarah, "Yay-hoo!"
Well, it's home for about 5 more weeks or so. Our guest apartment is on the left hand side, the window 4th from the bottom (2nd from the top). I thought some of you might like to see what an apartment complex looks like in this town...
p.s. You may have noticed the new Countdown Clock in my sidebar. I'm not actually that desperate to leave here (i.e. counting seconds, minutes, hours is a bit much) but we are getting excited to be coming home very soon. Very excited!
p.p.s. Notice the huge cell phone (or electrical?) tower just behind our apartment complex. I sure hope we're not getting cancer by living so close to it. I often hear a ringing sound in my ears. That's can't be good!
A few Easter pictures. It was a weird weekend, so there's not too many pictures. We did enjoy ourselves though...
While riding in a taxi cab today, Anna noticed two dogs running on the sidewalk beside us. She said, "Oh, look. I wonder if those dogs are strains." Then she noticed a guy catching up with them and said. "Nope, they're not strains. There is someone taking care of them."
Meanwhile, Sarah still pronounces many words in her own unique way.
For example, the two basic flavors of ice cream for Sarah are chocolate and granilla.
She recently was singing a song entitled "The Cat Came Back" in this way:
"The cat came back, thought he was an honor. The cat came back the very next day." I had to explain that the word was actually "goner" not honor and then I had to explain the meaning of the word goner. It was quite an amusing exchange.
Then Sarah keeps us laughing with a steady stream of e-cause (instead of because) dis (instead of this) and kitty-up (instead of giddy up, as in 'giddy up horsey'...). I'll have to keep track of some of the other interesting words and dialects I hear coming from the mouths of these little ones. They say the darndest things.
"I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face...It has something to do with incarnation...Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't but understand the singularity of it, the courage and the loneliness of it."
--from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
And for more photos by Jeremy Leffel, click here...
This is a photo my friend, Jeremy, took of some Tibetan script. Wonder what it says?
As Christa and I have been reflecting and discussing our future here in China, I have felt a "tug" to learn the Tibetan language. The language itself is pretty daunting, not that Mandarin is a cake-walk or anything.
Until recently I guess I have been reluctant to take on a new language (especially since my 2 years of studying Mandarin has left me very far from being "fluent") but the more I have thought about it and looked at my original goals for cross-cultural life and work, I realized that learning Tibetan WAS one of my original goals. My initial interests were born in Nepal and have always had a Tibetan-spin on them, but with all the difficulties of culture we've faced in the last 3 years, I think I lost sight of that.
So my current thinking is, "Why not go for it? I'm not getting any younger..."
I say this in a very nonchalant way, but in reality this "next step" type decision has been much less than straight-forward as you may have gathered. There has been a lot of Divine input, too. So, unless something else comes up, looks like I'll be back in the classroom in March 2009 with a new script and new sounds.
But first we will go back home (just 52 days left) and let our linguistic muscles rest for a bit .
On the wife front, Christa is feeling the tug to continue to get greater fluency in Mandarin. She really speaks clearly in Chinese (great tones!) and I think she will really make progress in the classroom and on the streets. So we'll be a bi-lingual couple, maybe? Or is it tri-lingual? Let's see, a splash of German, a dash of French, some Chinese, and Tibetan. And let's not forget English...
We're insane. Thanks for not mentioning it...
I've been so bored by the "art" of blogging lately (both reading and writing them) that I decided to go with a "I'm putting myself to sleep" design theme. I find it quite soothing...
Honestly, I was sorely tempted this week to just hit the [Delete Blog] button and rid myself of the whole endeavor, but in a moment of weakness I talked myself out of it. Vices are a terrible thing.
Maybe I can redirect these destructive impulses into a personal renaissance of creative inspiration. Or maybe I should just use my time building my own "self destruct" button like the one shown here...
Decisions, decisions.
"It was one day as I listened to baseball that it occurred to me how the moon actually moves, in a spiral, because while it orbits the earth it also follows the orbit of the earth around the sun. This is obvious, but the realization pleased me. There was a full moon outside my window, icy white in the blue sky, and the Cubs were playing Cincinnati."
-from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Well, I haven't been blogging much, but I've been busy in my STACK below... Highlights so far: Hood and Pilgrim At Tinker's Creek.
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I've collected quite a few "must-reads" in the last year or two. I've decided that this is the Stack that I want to read in the first half of 2008. There's some good stuff in here. Check it out.
You'll notice that most of these are novels with a smattering of creative non-fiction. Duncan's The Brothers K I've already read but hope to read again during spring training to get pumped for baseball season. I am sure I will pick up various Christian living, inspirational, and theological type books along the way (though none are shone here.) I'm pretty excited about this reading plan (though these are in no particular order.) Here's the list:
Happy Reading in 2008!
Very briefly I just wanted to let everyone know that the Johnson family is doing fine. There's been a lot of media attention out this way (more than we realized!) and for some of you that may have been a bit alarming. There were some "different scenes" around town over the weekend, but we stayed away from the crowds and celebrated Easter with our colleagues and were not really affected by it.
Today things were more normal. I actually helped with some gardening projects at our friends' place and the girls did some shopping. But please keep up the vertical communication for the situation and the people over here.
This week we're working on finding a new location for our library (if one is available?) due to the floor caving in. We'll let you know what happens with that.
Enjoy the arrival of Spring!
The other day Anna and Sarah were watching the children's animated version of The Passion. Sarah got upset after Jesus was crucified and died.
Anna, big sister that she is, reassured her with the following words:
"Don't worry. He'll come alive again. Piece of cake."
Piece of cake.
I like this picture above. I has a hobbit-hole feel about it.
He is RISEN, indeed. Go and tell it on the mountain...He's alive.
Happy Easter!
I talked about gratitude in my last post, so I thought I should dish some out.
Here's some things I am grateful for at the moment...
Oops, gotta run for now. More gratitude tomorrow...
