The Talking Sheep Lunar New Year Entry

My (non-denominational) god it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. So much has happened in my normally unhappening life in the past few months that I don’t know where to start. And things kept happening, so my no blogging hole got deeper and deeper as time went on. The bleeding gots to stop. So here is a quick update in an attempt to catch you up.

Ok, after I moved in to my renovated apartment with my favorite butt cleaning water spraying toilet seat, my parents (pic above left) came to visit for two months from San Diego, we had a great time living together for the first time since my high school days (I was a band nerd in high school by the way, I played the french horn, which was one step above the tuba in the instrument glamor hierarchy, way below the violin and trumpet and saxophone and even the cello, those guys got all the girls, well ok all the band girls that is), and my parents living here basically acted as an industrial strength stress test of my newly renovated apartment, what with my mom cooking up a storm and thus stress testing the kitchen, and my subsequent eating like 2 pigs and thus stress testing the sewage system, my dad playing his new er-hu and thus stress testing my new neighbors' patience, me sleeping in the study and thus stress testing the guest day bed (a fake Mies Van Der Rohe), multiple showers a day and thus stress testing the water softener and filters as well as the guest bathroom, the cold Shanghai weather and thus stress testing the floor heating system, and my apartment came through the stress testing pretty well except for the room thermostat for floor heating not working properly and gaps appearing in certain areas of the wood flooring, oh and most disappointing was the way the butt cleaning water spraying toilet seat not always functioning well, so these things need to get fixed (note to self), and after my parents left, right after Christmas, I decided to take a week long trip to Chiang Mai and Hanoi, discovered Air Asia, a discount airline that flies all over SE Asia, had a great time flying around the mountain roads in Chiang Mai in search of temples on a scooter held together with duct tape, no helmet, and had an equally great time in chaotic Hanoi eating unbelievably good beef and chicken pho noodles and drinking unbelievably good sweet black strong Vietnamese coffee, took about 1,000 pics on this trip, most of them crap, finally coming back to Shanghai after New Years, but then the weather got nasty in Shanghai … [ok, taking a deep breath now]… it actually snowed for like 8 straight days, with taxi drivers telling me that they haven’t seen this much snow since they were kids, like 30 years ago, but that’s only when I did manage to hail a cab with this bad weather, and I wore my winter boots from Michigan for the first time in about 15 years, good thing one’s feet do not get fat like the rest of one’s body, my boots still fit, and with this friggin cold weather my floor heating held up ok, after I plugged up a ventilation hole above my washer/dryer unit, damn I hate cold weather, and in the middle of it all I took a business trip back to the U.S. for a few days, during which, for the first time since I left California 5 years ago, I felt like a foreigner in the U.S., like, shit, what the hell am I doing here among all these weird people, I thought to myself, and can I ever come back and live this kind of life, I thought to myself some more, but maybe it was because I spent the whole time in Orange County, anyway when I got back to Shanghai, I finally went to kendo practice for the 1^st time in about 4 months, and almost had a cardiac arrest cos I’m so out of shape, but damn it felt good to be wielding my mighty powerful bamboo stick and getting in touch with my bad ass samurai self, well less bad ass and more big ass these days, and don’t look now, Lunar New Year is upon us, so here I am, on the second day of the Lunar New Year, with the city about 1/3 full, with everyone else traveling back to their homes visiting their families, and me sitting at Boona Café with a roomful of Europeans also left behind in Shanghai, getting kind of bored after spending the last 2 days watching cock fighting, Taiwanese variety shows and Jamie Oliver cooking shows on Discovery Channel, hey I think Jamie Oliver is all made up and fake, a product of Food Network marketing, he's like the Wizard of Oz of cook-ery and chef-ery, damn I gotta stop smoking, but ok, I’ll give myself until the end of the holidays next week, hmm how the hell am I going to amuse myself until my friends get back to town.

Ok ok, now that I’m all caught up, I’m going to spend my next few posts going into more detail on what has happened in my life over the past few months, namely my parents' visit, so don’t worry too much if you weren’t able to follow everything in that mess above (or didn’t feel like reading it, or gave up 1/2 way through), which by the way was inspired by one of my favorite Haruki Murakmi books where a talking sheep from Hokkaido spoke with no punctuation, but at least I was kind enough to punctuate, and, and, ok ok, I stop...