It’s been a whirlwind of activity since then. Movers had to be found. The dog had to be made EU import-ready. Apartment and car hunts needed to be launched. A new language learned (well it’s not new for Christian). Furniture bought. Jobs given notice. Ayi given notice. Adoption agency and home study guy given notice. Things given away. Friends bid farewell…

As of now, we’re in the final stretch with one month left in China (our stuff leaves on the slow boat in two weeks). As we get closer to the day of departure, loose ends actually are getting tied up and what once seemed like a Herculean effort is proving doable by mere mortals.

As part of our move, this website is also going to be changing with the hopes that without any silly things like real jobs to distract me, I’ll be better about updating it.

Next stop, Dornbirn, Austria!

I arrived at Dalian airport shortly before 6:30am for an 8:00am flight. By the time I made it to the front of the only economy line open to check in half the airport’s morning flights, it was 7:00am, and the woman at the check in counter informed me in Chinese that check in for my flight had already closed. I don’t have the vocabulary in Chinese for “check in has already closed, you poor bastard and there’s no way I’m going to do anything to help you such as tell you where my supervisor is because I really, really want you to miss this flight, you spoiled American,” so there were a series of panicked phone calls to Christian and the ticket booking company (which was closed!), as well as some swearing at two separate agents both of whom refused to check me in for a reason I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t until I went to the trouble of asking for a representative who spoke English that I was directed to a manager and she explained what was going on and checked me in anyway. It was 7:10 am at this point, and the final boarding call was already being made on the loud speaker for my 8:00am flight.

Of course, all the lines at security were super long. Though one woman, seeing me utterly horrified, mentioned that it was okay for me to cut the line since my flight was being repeatedly announced and all that. So I did, and no one said anything about it. After security, I ran to my gate, dropping everything from the pockets of my coat twice before finally arriving, short of breath and in a daze, confused as to why the flight’s staff were giving me quizzical looks. They didn’t seemed to notice that they’d been doing “final boarding” calls for five minutes. The plane ended up taking off at 7:35am, though to the end all the schedules continued to say 8:00am.

Despite the inauspicious start, the rest of my day in Beijing was quite fabulous. I went to a wonderful Ashtanga class at Fine Yoga, I found an imported food store filled with such hard-to-find delicacies as sourdough bread starter and red lentils, and spent far too much time oggling the books in some tiny Foreign language bookstore (not the big one near Tiananmen). In fact, if not for the inconvenience of spending forty five minutes getting my fingerprints taken and turning in documents at the Embassy, the entire day could have very well been one marvelous birthday present (you’re not getting out of my birthday that easily, though, Christian, but if you do want to give me another day in Beijing…). Heck, even the embassy was pretty fun. The guards had a great time going poking around my yoga mat and the groceries I left at the front gate and the officers in charge of my fingerprints and taking oaths and what not were all pretty jovial.

After the embassy, I had to spend some time hunting down a suitable box so that I could check my groceries on the flight home as I was pretty sure Christian’s giant bottle of Heinz 57 ketchup (not to mention my much coveted bottle of wine) would be declared a liquid. That done, I still made it back to the airport with plenty of time to enjoy a leisurely dinner at the awesome Thai restaurant in Terminal 3 as well as a cup of (not-Starbucks) coffee afterward.

Then it was back home on an eight thirty flight and straight to bed with dreams of all the organic brown rice pasta I didn’t buy gnawing at my brain.

I learned my lesson about being too optimistic, though, when I received a “desperate” call, asking me to MC the whole thing. By the time they finished stroking my ego, I found myself committed to far more than I wanted to be. Christian wasn’t exactly thrilled either when he found out our nice little family evening (we’d been planning on bailing early, when Nico got tired) had turned into me spending the evening working for no reimbursement yet again.

Things only went downhill from there when the party got overbooked and turned from a family affair into two separate parties: one for adults and one for children with the children only paraded briefly around the adult party like peacocks. As things grew further, the speeches from sponsors and magazine-related peeps grew and grew until the program started to resemble a press conference more than an actual party.

Christian and Nico still came with me, but after the dress I was forced to wear freaked Nico out to the point that he wanted nothing to do with me, they both headed home to a take out dinner and some movies, leaving me behind with the ruins of my own doing. I sucked it up and played it out.

Dinner was actually served early for once and I managed to get the entire thing wrapped up forty minutes before planned, which I felt was a pretty awesome feat (on paper, the party was intended to be FOUR hours long, which is a really long time, especially if the majority of the people you’re throwing the party for bail directly after dinner, which they, of course, did).

Yet when it was all done, I wasn’t exhilarated nor even relieved. I was just tired. Too tired to relay the events of the evening in a suitably scintillating manner, or so it seemed, as Christian’s attention couldn’t be kept for more than ten minutes before he started complaining about wanting to go to sleep.

Such was Saturday night.

Bummer.

A few days after 2nd anniversary issue of the magazine came out, people started coming up to me to ask if I’d really quit. I was impressed that my intentions to quit had remained intact. Then I got an email from one of the assistants at the magazine, telling me when my next article was due for the next issue and… Wait. Next article? No, no, no. That wasn’t right. And so I had to quit again. But they’ve finally gotten the message and apparently flew right out that week and replaced me with a new advice columnist. That stung a little as I like to think of myself as irreplaceable, but there you have it. I probably deserve much worse.

TV-wise, everything’s hunky-dory, though often dull. I’m still working every other week for the big TV station downtown, anchoring their English language news and editing Chinglish. It’s turned into a job in that I no longer find it all quirky and entertaining. My little local tv station is still postponing the start of the new program (it’s now supposed to start in January) and I’ve been assured that I will be anchoring that as well. The new format involves copying what the big tv station is doing, so I can expect to spend twice as much time doing half-as-interesting things, with the promise that all this work isn’t going to lead anywhere.

The whole not leading anywhere thing is getting to me. I like knowing that what I’m doing has the potential to grow and thrive and turn into something bigger and better than it currently is. I don’t like to sit around and stagnate, and usually I quit jobs once I realize they’re not actually going anywhere. Since our time in China is limited, and I’m likely going to have to quit my jobs once we welcome the new addition to our family, I’m not terribly concerned with the lack of upward momentum this time around. However, I’ve been itching to start working on some skills and qualifications for something I can likely continue to nurse no matter where we end up next (cause once the kids are in kindergarten, this gal ain’t stickin’ around the house, nosirree). I want to do something that will help people, that will help me to grow as a person, and doesn’t rely on the color of my skin or the emblem on my passport.

I’ve been practicing yoga for years, since my freshman year of college. It allowed me to retain some semblance of sanity during break ups, weird relationships, and my pregnancy with Nico. But it didn’t occur to me that I might feasibly do anything with it until recently when friends and gym acquaintances started coming up to me and suggesting I start a class. I’ve been pointing out that there are yoga teacher around here, but still, it got me thinking…

So for my next project, I’m going to get my yoga teacher certification and see what I can do with it.

“Have you uploaded the puppy pictures yet?”

You see, life was not challenging enough. I’m on a forced vacation for an indefinite period of time because the fate of the English language tv show I host is in limbo. Actually, this is sort of convenient, since it means I’m presently unemployed which in turn means I don’t need proof of employment and also have loads of time to track down Chinese police clearances and make sure the cat’s up to date on his vaccines. It also means even after tracking down those police clearances, running the cat to the vet, and tackling the usual grocery shopping, I have still been able to get home early every day this week to take Nico outside so Ayi could do some extra special things like wash our huge windows with a toothbrush. What’s more, all this free time–when I’m not double and triple checking lists of documents I didn’t even really know existed once upon a time or organizing said documents so that they’re easily retrievable at a moment’s notice or rearranging the piles of things Ayi’s not supposed to touch so that we don’t look like complete slobby packrats–allows me the leisure to run our new golden retriever puppy, Gaudi, outside every fifteen minutes just in case she has to go.

Because nothing says “upright, responsible parents” like buying a two month old puppy a week before your adoption homestudy…

…And if I ever get a free moment, you won’t believe how cute these puppy pictures are…

When I was finally paid, they tried to cut my salary down by a quarter. And that was the tv station’s version of being nice. I was able to argue my way into full pay, whereas both the cameraman and the English translator, tired of being professionally abused, decided to quit. They were the last original remnants of this show.

Then the tv station, knowing full well that I’m on a spousal visa and not a working permit (and thus technically not allowed to work for money) sent me down to the headquarters of the Exit-Entry Bureau (the guys in charge of visas and who gets to stay and who has to go) to interview some vey important and very friendly PSB officer who was all too happy to point out that what I’m doing is illegal and needs to be remedied, leading to the admittedly minor possibility that I could get kicked out of China. Then he cheerfully rewrote our entire news story just to add insult to injury and suck out what little life it had left.

That was a bad month.

Also, my family’s been riding me hard about viewing my stint as a famous tv-type person. For those interested, here’s a link with what I believe are my episodes (ironically, my mac can’t play whatever the heck file format these use no matter what I download, so I can’t even watch).

Other than that, not much news. Nico’s still a rascal. I can still walk and was informed today that when the TV station moves in May, I will be getting my own honest to goodness desk… Oh! And we’ll be taking a trip to Beijing from the 21st to 25th of May and to Chengdu from the 25th of May to the 1st of June. I’m really, really excited about the Chengdu aspect of the trip as it will include Sichuan food, Buddhist temples, minority villages, and pandas (well, it will if I have my way).