Tag Archives: CLO

Po’s Stomping Grounds

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The Valley of Peace sits just beyond our doorstep here in Chengdu, just an hour by high speed train from the city. Once there it is easy to imagine Po popping out from behind a pillar as he watches epic training battles ensue between the Furious Five.  Wandering amid the ancient Daoist temples and through the heavily forested mountainside, it is a short leap of imagination to envisioning Tigress, Monkey, Mantis, Viper, and Crane studying under Shifu and competing to be the best marital artists in all the land, knowing that they must be prepared to defend their treasure from the wicked Tai Lung.

While this “Valley of Peace” may not exist anywhere but in Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda, the setting that served as inspiration for the film is just a short high-speed train ride away from our home here in Chengdu. DuJiang Yan, the inspiration for those awe-inspiring backgrounds detailed so thoroughly in the film, is not only a breathtaking bit of scenery in western China, but also home to a ground-breaking (literally) irrigation project undertaken in 250BC, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Before the DuJiang Yan irrigation system was built, the Chengdu plain was dry and infertile, but the area near the Min River flooded every spring, causing continual hardship for those farmers living nearby who relied on the river to nourish their crops. Li Bing, a local governor, is credited with noticing the annual adversity, although one would have to think the farmers were well aware of the issue long before anyone official decided to “notice” it. (I’ll refrain from drawing comparisons between Qin Dynasty bureaucracy and more modern-day political wrangling we will be forced to ingest over the next forty-three days.)

He knew the frigid water came from the melting snowpack in the distant mountains and realized that the river must stay open for trade via shipping and his army’s mobility, but also saw that something must change if the people were to continue to prosper in the Sichuan valley.  (And prosper they must, as the world was waiting with baited breath for the introduction of the infamous, mouth-numbing Sichuan spices that invade my every meal!) Because restricting the water flow was out of the question, Li Bing knew a dam was not an option and had to move on to bigger and more inventive ways of creating a habitable region for his people.  While the 1970’s overused the phrase “think outside the box” to the point where it is painfully cliché, Mr. Li might have been on that bandwagon long before corporate America’s management gurus thrust their geometrical jargon upon us.

With his son by his side, (and with some legends including a dragon, which just makes the whole story a whole lot cooler)  eight years of toil by more than 100,000 laborers created a levee system like none the world had seen. Bamboo cages were filled with rocks, redirecting sections of the river away from the flood zone.(The current tourist attraction at DuJiang Yan shows some of these bamboo wrapped rocks, looking eerily similar to something upper-middle class American housewives would buy for a premium price at Pottery Barn!)

Unlike many of the things man makes today, Li Bing’s irrigation system has withstood the test of time.(This was definitely no IKEA, no tools needed, home improvement project!)  Not only are his hand-dug river channels still funneling water throughout the Sichuan plains today, helping to irrigate thousands of acres of farmland, but the levees were flexible enough to withstand the rocking and rolling of the land when the area became the epicenter of a massive earthquake in 2008. (This being the same quake that made my newly built cement apartment building, 150 miles north in Gansu, split at the seams and crumble in the corners.)

Growing up in the midst of farms (potatoes, sugar beets, corn, wheat, mint…and the list goes on…), I was raised understanding the importance of having adequate water for the crops to prosper. And as a kid, I endured more than one lecture from a perturbed farmer who was unhappy with the McDaniel kids pulling his syphon tubes. (Our fiddling wasn’t malicious; we just wanted to know what agricultural magic made water flow uphill. And sadly, I still can’t explain it. Yes, I know the basic principles of physics that dictate the water’s movement, but much like I know the theoretical physics behind airplanes, I am still partially convinced that it all boils down to fairy dust and hocus-pocus.)

So, another CLO trip is in the books.  A day out at an ancient irrigation system was the perfect foil to life in a giant city for this country girl. I may not have spotted Po and his evil leopard fighting crew, but I did enjoy a nearly perfect fall day in what was definitely a Valley of Peace.

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My Lungs Are Whispering Sweet Words of Gratitude

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Lungs like fresh air.  (It’s true. I looked it up on Wikipedia.)

To that end, a day out of Chengdu is a perfect “pulmo-cation” and so I did my CLO-duty and planned a trip to Luo Dai, an ancient city about an hour outside Sichuan’s capital that boasts a mini-Great Wall, horses that take riders around a lake and a tourist-filled street of shopping and photography. (That’s right, I’m making up words again. But, what better way to describe a day long holiday for one’s largest respiratory organ than “pulmo-cation?”)

While the idea was to give people a chance to get out of the city, see some of the surrounding countryside and enjoy the first fall-fall feeling day of the season, the bit of R&R for our lungs was also greatly appreciated. But, instead, some of us decided to punish our lungs with a hike up the small-Great Wall in Luo Dai.  (I always thinking hiking is a good idea. My brain thinks it sounds invigorating and refreshing, but about ten minutes in to whatever excursion I previously thought to be a positive experience, I am mentally cursing myself, with a few of those murmurs escaping my lips.)

As with many Chinese tourist-sites, stairs are the name of the game at Luo Dai. From the base of the hill, Thad and I could see the staircase straddling the ramparts of the wall, headed straight up the mountainside, with no respite until the first large guard tower, which lay at least a million stairs in front of us. At this point though, I was still gung-ho and ready to go! We were out of Chengdu, the weather was cool and misty and I was ready to tackle the challenge.

That all changed about twenty stairs in to the hike when my lungs were starting to ache from (possibly) too much fresh air, my thighs burned with each unevenly spaced stair and gravity started pulling heavier and heavier on my purse carrying our umbrellas, a water bottle, paper for the squatties and other necessities.

But, with more pride than brains sometimes, I continued up the mountain, taking it a stair at a time and pausing every ten or so to catch my breath, shed a layer or sip some quickly disappearing water.

The countryside surrounding the wall was beautiful. Because it had rained overnight, there trees were covered in dew drops and the air had the crisp feeling that tells you autumn is right around the corner. I would love to say it was somewhere we will haul all of our visitors, (you’re coming, right visitors?) but we were sadly disappointed in how commercialized the area is. As we stood to look back at the path we had already traversed (this being between the second and third guard towers on the wall, and really just an excuse for me to let my lungs simmer down a bit), rather than getting an expansive view of the wall, the forests and the sky, we saw rows of tents, set up on the pathway, hawking everything from ice cream and cold noodles to rubber snakes, plastic whistles and canvas shoes. (I think the canvas shoe business is booming on the wall, as I saw more than one Chinese woman ascending in high heels, but then all those coming back down the wall were shod in flats. Maybe one should consider their choice of footwear before undertaking such an outing?)

After the third guard tower, as we faced another steep climb up the final leg of the mountain, my lungs were crying “Uncle” and Thad’s disgust with the endless selling of random crap on the wall got the better of us. We decided it was best to call it a day on the wall and go ride horses instead. Not wanting to backtrack our entire journey (the wall in Luo Dai does not make a circuit, meaning once you reach the end, you must turn around and go back the way you came), so we drew on our Gansu roots and hopped of the beaten (mortared and stoned) path. After crawling down a slick, rickety ladder that went over the side of the wall, we passed through a hole in the wall and found a farmer’s pathway. We knew if we made it back to the lake we would easily find the rest of our group, so down the hill we went, with not quite the grace of mountain goats, but with neither of us ending up on our bums either. (Because of the rain the night before, the dirt path was a bog of red-hued mud that caked on to my tennis shoes, adding a good five pounds to my weight by the time we reached the foot of the hill. I spent quite a while this morning, squatting on the floor of my bathroom with the shower head in hand, trying to get the red-dye of the mud off my cute pink and gray kicks!)

After passing through what was clearly an outdoor chicken slaughter house (the blood and feathers were fresh enough for me to assume the recently deceased chicken was probably the same one staring back at me, comb and all, from a stew placed in the center of our table just an hour later), we came upon the lake and it’s bored looking horses. (Much like a NASCAR driver, these horses spend their days in a continual state of turning left.)

The day continued with a quick loop around the lake on a horse with an unintelligible Sichuan Hua named mount (local dialect, confounding for native Mandarin speakers, which makes it way beyond my subsistence level Chinese abilities)  for me and Thad’s hilariously named steed- Shui Bi (Sprite) and then lunch that included the previously mentioned, recently expired chicken. Then it was back in to town to stroll the “ancient street” in search of Luo Dai trinkets without which I couldn’t survive. (Not surprisingly, there was nothing that fell in to this category.) This old part of town is a hotspot where young women rent costumes from ancient dynasties and then pose in the various courtyards as if they were members of the ruling family. Thad and I were sucked in to numerous photo sessions while we wandered the street. Nothing says anachronism like a Chinese woman attired in a beautiful Qing dynasty gown, sharing the frame with a mud-covered, jean-clad white woman!

While the day ran a bit longer than I had expected, I am chalking this one up to as a CLO-success, as the hour long bus ride back to Chengdu was filled with open-mouth naps, not only on the part of the kids (most of whom scaled the mini-Great Wall as if they were close cousins with a gazelle family), but also by a number of both adults and tour guides. When that many Z’s are needed, I think it counts as a great Saturday!

(And, I am sure our lungs are giving us a standing, pneumo-vation.)

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The Case of the Missing HHE

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It may have taken a few months to get the paperwork sorted out, but just a week ago today I was thrilled to announce that I was “Rolling in the Renminbi.” That windfall (okay, windfall may be a bit of an exaggeration, but at least I have employment and a steady source of income) was a high point of the week, leading to a lovely Sunday outing to ChunXi Lu where I treated Thad to the long-promised Pizza Hut meal.

(Pizza Hut may seem like an odd choice for celebrating a new job, and while Pizza Huts in China are fancier than those in America, with waitresses in long white aprons and fancy decorations adorning the restaurant, that is not why we chose to eat pan pizzas for our personal-sized party. Rather, when we were here with Peace Corps, Pizza Hut was the destination for pizza whenever we happened to be called in to Chengdu for a meeting. It was pricey on a Peace Corps budget, so we would plan carefully, weighing the triple threat of quantity we wanted to consume vs. the quantity our stomachs could handle after being without dairy and grease for so long vs. the amount of cash we were going to drop on a single meal.  Now, here on Thad’s Foreign Service salary and my CLO income, we could eat Pizza Hut every day if we wanted. [Ugh! We don’t want.]  So, falling back in to the DINK category, it was off to Pizza Hut where I promised to buy Thad anything he wanted off the menu- although when he went with the popcorn chicken stuffed crust pizza, I did have to question his taste. )

With the successful deposit of my hard-earned  money into our account I thought we’d have smooth sailing for the foreseeable future.

I should have known better.

Monday morning I was greeted with a long-anticipated email from our consulate customs staff member saying our HHE (Foreign Service speak for “everything that was in my Idaho house which has been in storage for the last sixteen months) had arrived in Chengdu and was ready to be delivered to our apartment.

YES!

For weeks now I’ve been mentally pacing my office, hoping to hear that our stuff is in town. I’m excited for the wall hangings from Idaho to help disguise my cement walls. I’m itching to read the piles of books that I know are in plastic Rubbermaid tubs, just waiting to line up neatly on the shelves of my apartment.  I’m uncharacteristically enthusiastic about the pots and pans and plates and pitchers awaiting homes in my Chinese kitchen. And I’m dying to get my hands on my school supplies to make my office at work not only more colorful, but also more organized and efficient.

With a twinkle of excitement in my eye, I dropped by the cubicle of the staff member in charge of shipment deliveries this afternoon. My excuse for popping in was that I wanted to verify the time of tomorrow’s delivery, but in reality, I just wanted to look at the white board that says “Ross” and “October 14” that hangs in his office, announcing to the world that I will soon have a complete household.

This was a poor choice.

Rather than walking away with the same twinkle in my eye, I walked out of his cubicle holding back a tear. There will be no massive HHE shipment tomorrow. There will be one box.

That’s right. One, single, lonely box.

After a bit of mild panic at Thad’s desk, an almost meltdown in my bosses office (which took every ounce of my power to contain, but as nothing less than a professional, I did my best to hide the tears of frustration with a smile and a whole lot of note-taking) and a few deep breaths behind the closed door of my office,  it was time to get to the bottom of the mystery of my missing HHE. (I really could have used the detective help of Scooby-Doo today. If only that goofy dog and his slightly-stoned partner in mystery-solving were here to follow a green slimy monster through a deserted amusement park, eventually unmasking him as the horrible customs official who was hiding my goods.)

A bit of digging revealed a much more bureaucratic bad-guy: paperwork.

It seems that when Thad scheduled our whole pack-out from the mo-partment, he told them that we also had a lot of items in storage that would need to be shipped to Chengdu at the same time. The operator that he spoke with said that wouldn’t be a problem, so we left it at that. Somewhere between that discussion and the forms though, this extra piece of information was lost in the shuffle and the operator never added the note about our other boxes that were resting in storage.

None of this came to light until today, when I saw the packing slip that was written out for a single box.

After sixteen week in Chengdu, we will now wait another eight (or more…it is hard to be optimistic at this point) weeks to be able to finally settle in and completely make our apartment home.

Tomorrow I will get my giant box of goodies, most of them items I collected on my shopping spree to Costco in the weeks leading up to our departure, and for this I am grateful, as I may need those bulk-sized boxes of chocolate pudding cups and the case of brownie mixes to get me through the frustration of not getting family photos and holiday decorations for another two months.

Here’s to countless more weeks of white walls, pineapple shaped lamps and a set of dishes that rivals those we had when we were first married…

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Rolling in Renminbi

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I don’t want to make money; I just want to be wonderful.  -Marilyn Monroe

 

We’ve been in China for fifteen weeks now, which means I’ve been on the job for thirteen weeks. (Knowing the exact number of weeks we’ve been living in Sichuan has nothing to do with a countdown to another placement or some crazy obsession with days and hours and minutes spent here, but rather a patient ticking off of the rotations of the sun on the prison wall containing my HHE. We got an email from the mysterious Mr. Xu this last week that told us our worldly goods have made it to Chengdu, but won’t be released until someone goes down and pays a rather large sum of cash for them. Customs fees? Bribes? Ransom money? I have no idea, but I feel like maybe this transaction is going to involve a large silver suitcase, a key to an anonymous locker in a bustling train station and a lot of ear-piece wearing folks in dark suits  and Ray-Ban sunglasses. All of this, at least in my imagination, for a quirkily painted dresser I bought at a flea market in DC, some jars of peanut butter and boxes of Cheerios made in the epic Costco run and a few boxes of clothing that I haven’t seen in well over a year and will probably dispose of anyway.)

But, fifteen weeks and thirteen on the job. No big deal, right? Except, I hit a major milestone Thursday.

I GOT PAID!!

That’s right. It took thirteen weeks and no small amount of extra work on the parts of my management officer and the consulate’s office management specialist, but payday has arrived!

Marilyn Monroe may have been content with being wonderful, but I’d rather be wonderful *and* have the cash-o-la to buy a bauble or two to accessorize said wonderfulness. I firmly believe one can never have enough purses, necklaces or shoes. To which end, I’ve been spending Thad’s hard earned paycheck, but now, I’ve got not only his, but mine as well!

I’ve promised Thad a fancy evening at Pizza Hut to celebrate my new-found position as a bread-winner in the Ross household, but our party plans have been put on hold for a few days, as Thad has been serving as the social sponsor for a new family who has moved in to our apartment complex. That means trips to the airport (possibly putting him within yards of our hostage-held belongings), dinners at neighborhood restaurants, trips to grocery stores and cell phone outlets and just general introductions to the fabulous area in which we live. Plus, with the earthquake in Yiling on Friday, he had to go in and work for a few hours today, making sure any Americans in the affected areas are safe and accounted for. Needless to say, payday pizza has been put on hold for a bit. But, pizza and possibly the world’s most elaborate salad do await us. Sometime. Soon.

While you don’t need to call me up if you are gangsta’, I do like fancy and you are definitely free to get dancey, so, like Pink and her pop-punk party crashes, won’t you come on, come on and raise your glass.  I am once again a wage-earning member of society.

Considering a Name Change– Eudora Welty, Maybe?

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I recently wrote about several run-ins with local insects and how I have a rather large aversion to those multi-legged little creatures. (See “Getting Buggy with it in Chengdu.”) As the polar opposite of a bug-lover, I thought I had said my piece and was ready to move on to something more important, or at least more adventurous. Instead, it seems that I have enraged the local minuscule critter population and now I am paying the price for it.

On Saturday, I hosted a back-to-school potluck for the consulate community. (Event planning is part of my gig as CLO. My years at Marsing Middle School, planning fundraisers and organizing the annual 8th Grade Recognition Night gave me a full party-planning toolbox!) We went with a school-theme, as it is appropriate for the time of year, but really, it was just an excuse to get together, enjoy the pool, some fun music and a medley of random dishes. (Potluck in China is hard. Desserts are the go-to dish to bring, as they are easy to come up with here. I, for one, made a cobbler from Tianshui peaches and imported Bisquick. It is the main dishes that cause a problem. No one ever really knows what to bring. In the US, I feel like a casserole would be the dish of choice. I’ve been to enough church potlucks to know that some pasta cooked in cream of something soup, mixed with shredded cheese and topped with crushed potato chips goes over well, whether the event is a holiday dinner or an after-funeral meal This may be one of the only ways you could get both Santa and Death on the same Venn diagram. The only more popular side dish may have been green Jell-O topped with shredded carrots, but gelatin of any color isn’t going to last long in mid-day heat and humidity, so that wasn’t even an option to be considered.)  Even if main dishes are a bit more difficult to whip up in Chengdu, the spread was great. We had everything from fried rice to chicken and cuscus to a noodle salad. Any afternoon that consists of full bellies and a full pool should be considered a success!

But, back to the point- the bugs have a vendetta against me.

While I was enjoying the afternoon in the sun, I unknowingly became a bit of a feast myself.  (Yes, almost real sun in Chengdu! So much so that I actually came home with the slightest sunburn around the edges of my tank top. As an extremely pasty-skinned person, I merely have to think about sunshine to turn beet red, start to peel and then return to my natural ghostly state. My point is, it doesn’t take much exposure to the giant ball of fire in the sky for me to burn, so I’m not equating Chengdu on Saturday with the tropics by any means, but this is the first bit of color I’ve had since we arrived in May. I’m claiming the weekend as a sunny one.)

The potluck may have been spread on the picnic tables, but I simultaneously served as a walking buffet for the evil that is the bug-world. I didn’t notice it at the time, as I sat chatting with colleagues and enjoying a great mix of pop music from the last three decades, but on Sunday morning, I awoke rather early, scratching my legs as I moved from the world of dreams to that of real life. As I rolled out of bed and got a glimpse of my legs in the mirror, I was horrified. I had somehow contracted the plague overnight!

My legs, the right one in particular, were covered with some serious mosquito bites and welts! The flying, blood sucking inhabitants of Chengdu mean business with their bites. Each welt was swollen, bubbling up into a disgusting puff of tight-skin encircled in red.

I’ve spent the last two days trying to think of anything but scratching my legs, while I can do nothing but rake at them with my fingernails. I know I shouldn’t scratch them, as it only makes the itch worse, but the pain of running my nails up my legs creates just enough relief that I can’t stop. (It is a good thing I was such a goody-two-shoes in school, as I apparently have no self-control!)

As someone who does not normally get eaten alive my mosquitoes (this is usually Thad’s area of expertise), one or maybe two bites is the most my legs ever see at a given time. I can only assume that this abundance of welts is payback from the insects of the city for denigrating their kind in a previous blog post. It seems my buggy little friends have a good VPN and are blog-stalking me, and then taking their revenge on my hapless, normally white but currently mottled red and pink, calves.

Take head dwellers of a world measured in millimeters. Twelve or fifteen of you itty-bitty life forms may have used me as a human smorgasbord over the weekend, but know, I will stand for this no longer. If even one tiny bug shows his face (or creepy, wiggling antennae) in my office in the near future, he will become a mere grease spot on the cover of Chengdoo Magazine.

Be warned.

Beware.

Be gone.

Ouch!

Gettin’ Buggy With It in Chengdu

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Bugs. Insects. Creepy-crawlies. Six and eight-legged sources of evil. Call them what you will, but they freak me out.

My dislike of all exoskeleton bearing creatures started at a young age. I can remember going out to my dad’s woodshop and having Velcro-bugs cling to my legs with their sticky little feet if I happened to brush up against a weed. I can’t tell you how many times I sprinted through a garden patch, hoping to avoid the flying grasshoppers that I was sure were aiming for my face. And don’t even get me started on having to mow the lawn under what my family lovingly calls “the bee tree.”  (For those with an interest in actual, real-life, even semi-scientific nomenclature, I can’t help you much. I have no idea what a Velcro-bug really is, and I only know that “the bee tree” gets little yellow flower clusters that are apparently crack for bees. The tree is basically a living, whirling mass of buzzing for weeks on end each summer.)

This dislike of all things with too many legs rears its ugly, tentacle-clad head today because in the last week I’ve had two run-ins with representatives of various species.

The first was at work on Tuesday morning. I was in my office, just doing my CLO thing (meaning answering emails from FSOs who are soon moving to Chengdu, talking about pet-shipping, schools and apartments), when I look over to see an evil, hairy little spider crawling on the wall, right next to my tea thermos. I instantly quit typing, as I don’t any movement/sound to draw his attention in my direction. After staring at him for a good minute, without moving, I decide I must end his existence. While I was staring, he was also stuck in a state of suspension, his only movement being the incessant waggling of his antennae. (Okay, I do remember enough from middle school science to know that spiders don’t have antennae, but that is what they looked like to me! To not enrage my middle school science teaching older sister, I looked up spider anatomy on Wikipedia, which tells me those creepy, wiggling appendages stuck to his head are called pedipalps. I am not sure finding this information is worth the nightmares I am sure to have after seeing so many up close and too personal pictures of arachnids. Next time, I may choose to bear the wrath of the sister instead.)

Once I broke off the staring contest, which I believe he won, but to be fair, the fact that he had numerous eyes made it a bit difficult for me to gauge when the staring contest concluded. At this point, he took off at a dead-sprint, possibly vying for a spot on the arachnid’s Olympic team. (I can only imagine their team flag would bear a bit ol’ ugly black widow in the center, with team colors being black, white and red. Creepy!)  Mr. Spider decided to use the payday calendar, the one that I have ever-so-classily taped to my wall, as a shelter while he contemplated how he could psychologically torture me for the rest of the day. (If you follow this blog with much regularity, you will see the irony in the fact that I even have a payday calendar, as I have been working for a good eight weeks and have yet to see my bank account balance rise.)

With the hairy, evil, spawn of the devil hiding behind a piece of photocopied office paper, I made a quick lunge for my keyboard, sending Thad (who works a floor below me in the consulate) an SOS instant message, asking him to come rescue me from my tormentor. The problem was, Thad’s new boss started on Monday, so it wasn’t ideal timing for him to wander away from his section on an errand of heroism. Visas need adjudicated and a new boss is patrolling the office. He was stuck and I was left to fend for myself.

I knew I needed to get some actual work done, so I figured it was time to take matters into my own hands. With a giant wad of paper towels (a bug approaching technique learned from my mother) and a canvas bag (to be used as a swatter), I rounded my desk, ready to fight.

With the first swat, I knew this little sucker had my number. I took a jab at him and he responded by jumping at me! I squawked and stumbled backwards, tripping over a chair, but gracefully remained upright. Going in for a second stab didn’t get me any closer to being the sole occupant of my office once again. Rather, he leapt at me again (I swear he was aiming for my eyes!) and then scurried into the space between my desk and the wall.

It was over. I couldn’t get to him and he knew it. So, I set aside my weapons of choice and tried to resume the task of welcoming new officers and their families to Chengdu. The only problem was, I swear I could feel that little creepster crawling up my leg all morning long. I eventually had to resort to kicking off my shoes (and putting them on the shelf behind my desk, as I didn’t dare leave them on the floor, tempting my enemy to take up a new residence) and curling my feet up under my skirt on the chair. Sitting like a school kid, hoping no one decided to drop by my office for a chat at just that moment, I resumed answering queries about the quality of Chengdu hospitals (is there a ranking below “poor?”) and the community is general (definitely an “excellent!”)

That was Tuesday. I haven’t seen my nemesis since, but I can sense he is still around. Waiting…watching…biding his time.

Now it is Saturday. I thought my bug woes were over for the week, but no such luck.

Weekend mornings are pretty calm and lazy. I am usually up early, have a bowl of coveted cereal (miniature box of Fruit Loops today), check my Facebook (cute video of my former student, Shea, at NFL training camp) and then read for a while until it is a decent time to Skype home. This morning, post cereal (which I usually eat sitting on the floor, cross-legged, in front of the coffee table so I can surf the internet), but pre-Skype, I looked down in time to witness an earwig (which must be one of the most disturbing bugs in the bug world- I don’t think even earwig moms like the sight of their earwig offspring) making his way across my living room tile, in the exact spot that my butt was occupying no less than thirty minutes before.

Well, there is no way I am going to have a repeat of the missing insect debacle. (Yes, I know, technically spiders aren’t insects! Whatever.)  But, at the same time, there is no way I am going to get near the disgusting creature and his pinchers, even with an entire roll of paper towels wadded up in my hands. So, what is one to do? I did the only thing I could do until Thad was up to rid the apartment of the creepy critter for good. I threw a Kleenex on him and then piled all four of our rubber coasters on top of him, thereby pinning him in place until the extermination crew got out of bed. (Why the Kleenex? Do you want earwig pieces parts on the coaster you set your drink on? I didn’t think so!)

I really hope my buggy week has come to an end. To be fair, both many-stemmed critters were tiny. I’ve seen much larger, more terrifying insects in our world travels, but they are usually out in nature, where they rightfully belong. These two little guys were invading *my* space, not the other way around. I fear at some point Thad will be posted in a bug-ridden country, at which point I may have to take to wearing my mosquito net as a full-time accessory. (You don’t even want to get me started on my bug stories from when I was living in the Dominican Republic!) Until then, I’m calling this week a draw:

Creepy critters: 1             Me: 1

My soon-to-be patented earwig containment unit, awaiting disposal

 

Chengdu Redo!

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We’ve reached the two month mark in Chengdu. That means we’ve got two months of hotpot and Sichuan-style dishes in our bellies, but also two months of polluted air in our lungs. On a cosmic triple-beam balance, those may come out dead even. (Really though, I can’t say I’ve seen any negative effects from the air. Some days I can see farther through the haze than others, but as far as how I feel, so far there have been no noticeable side effects. Let’s wait until winter and see if this little bird is singing a different song…)

In the last eight weeks I’ve gone from being unemployed and living in what was basically a hotel (that makes me sound much more vagrant than the reality of the situation!) to fully-employed and living in a three-bedroom, two bath 24th floor apartment with a housekeeper that comes twice a week (which makes me sound a lot more fancy-pants than the reality of the situation!)

I’ve also joined the ranks of the scooting folks in China, (click here for that story) with just one mishap of note. Last Thursday, coming home from work, I was gleefully riding along, actually contemplating what a great, problem free trip is was turning out to be, when a, let’s say “jerk” in case there are any younger readers of this blog, comes up the scooter lane going the wrong direction. Not only was he a fish swimming upstream, but he decided that he didn’t need to yield to the traffic coming in the correct direction. He threaded his scooter in the space between my fabulous fuchsia one and another woman’s less awesomely colored one, clipping mine in the process. This put me into a reverse-fishtail, making the front end of my scooter skid all over the place. To get it back under control, I put my foot out to steady the twisting, at which point I kicked the metal guard railing, smacking it with the top of my foot. My first reaction was thinking I had broken my foot, but the shooting pain soon lessened to a slight throbbing, and with both self and scooter under control (under control doesn’t count what I was murmuring under my breath the rest of the ride home) I made it over the bridge and to my apartment complex. Once in the scooter parking garage, I checked my bike for damage, and finding none, checked my foot, which was a bit swollen and had a few scratches, but was none the worse for the wear.  Just another reminder to always be aware when scooting in China!

A nice apartment furnished with an actual dishwasher and a clothes dryer, plus a bathtub and several air purifiers were not a part of my life when I was living in Gansu. Neither was a the hot-pink scooter, as volunteers, even helmeted ones, were banned from riding them.  Now, these things are just normal parts of my daily routines. I’m movin’ up in the world!

But, while being here with the State Department is definitely a different experience than being here with Peace Corps, some things never change. We’ve been doing a lot of rediscovering things/places we knew when we were in Chengdu for training with the Peace Corps.

Peter’s Tex-Mex is back on the dinner options list, where I semi-regularly enjoy a plate of macaroni and cheese. (Yes Kristen, I always say it in my head with your quirky emphasis! It will never just be regular mac and cheese again.)

We’ve hit up Sabrina’s Country Store for our extravagantly over-priced import needs, such as Cheetos and Pop-tarts and the brownies that I made for my CLO-sponsored New Spouses Welcome Coffee last week. (As I am still learning the quirks of the Chinese oven, as elucidated in “Betty Crocker, I Am Not,” the brownies did not turn out beautifully. They tasted yummy, but they could have used another two or three minutes in the oven, meaning when they came out of the pan, they were a bit on the soft side and ended up squished by the spatula. Then it didn’t help that I had to put them in a Tupperware container in the “trunk” of my scooter! Needless to say, they were tasty but definitely not pretty.)

Since we’ve been back, we’ve also re visited the pandas (click here to read about their fuzzy fabulous-ness), JinLi Street’s tourist shops, where I bought my first round of postcards to send home to family, the Wide and Narrow Alleys and a couple of “antique” markets.

It has been a clichéd blink of an eye. Maybe it is because we lived here before, or hopefully because we are just so dang adaptable, but we’ve quickly created routines and habits to help us make Chengdu home.

Two months. Eight weeks. Fifty-six days. One thousand three hundred forty-four hours. Eighty thousand six hundred forty minutes. Four million eight hundred thirty-eight thousand four hundred seconds. It may not quite be the lyrics from Rent, but it is how I currently measure the life of this woman in my season of Chengdu love.

 

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Dead Presidents Still Illude Me

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Tomorrow will be the four-week marker of my new job as CLO in Chengdu.  Today, being a State Department payday, clearly marked in red on the official work calendar taped to the dingy white wall next to my computer, was one that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. After quitting my teaching job May of 2011, I effectively took the entire next year off. (I like to consider it a dry-run at retirement. I give it an overall rating of 70/30. 70% of the time was fabulous. I read. I wrote. I traveled. 30% was frustrating. I hid from the maid. I ate too many doughnuts. I took one too many naps. Next time a shot at semi-retirement comes around, I’ll be set!) Granted, due to the timeline of teacher pay, where contracts run September to August, I got paid on the 25th of each month throughout the summer, but in essence, it has been a year since I have added anything to the Ross family coffers.  (I would like to say in that year I also didn’t deplete said coffers in any way, but between LASIK and flights to Idaho and a furiously fuchsia scooter, we all know that isn’t true!)

With this black hole of employment behind me, I have been eagerly awaiting my paycheck. (I have to admit that my excitement doesn’t quite reach the levels it did when I tore off the edges around the three-perforated sides of my first paycheck envelope, at the age of sixteen, that I got from good ol’ ShopKo, where I started working at the bargain rate of $5.25/hour.  At that point, seeing my name printed on the check was a new thrill. I quickly endorsed it and drove it over to our credit union, where I promptly deposited the parental requirement of one-half into my college savings account and signed on the dotted line for some cash from the remaining funds that would buy me wonders such as the cute new sandals I had been coveting at Payless and a Clay Walker CD to keep me company on the drive to work and back a few times a week.  These days, there is no envelope to carefully unfold and no dotted line to endorse. It will all directly in to an account on a different continent! It is definitely a bit anticlimactic.)

Enough of the walk down memory lane. It’s payday- remember?

A glimmer in my eye and my newly minted Employee Express password in hand accompanied me to my computer to this morning, where I was sure I would see the results of the last three hectic weeks.(Between taking on a new job at the height of the annual 4th of July mayhem, the sudden and unexpected loss of our GSO left me filling in a hole here and a hole there, helping out wherever I was able.)  I had already told Thad I was treating him to dinner at Pizza Hut (What?!? It is fancy in China!) as a celebration of the new source of income.

But alas, it was not to be.

Logging into the payment system revealed a sad (and poor) discovery- there will be no pay this week. Apparently, the State Department is a little slow when it comes to issuing first paychecks, taking several pay periods to get their accounts set up so that the green paper flows my way.

No pay=no Pizza Hut. (Not because Pizza Hut is out of our price range with just Thad’s income, but because I wanted it to be a special treat- *my* treat!)

But, I shall not despair.  Two weeks from now, rather than sitting at my adorable pink computer, in my newly rearranged office area, pondering the workings of the Department and wondering what that first paycheck will amount to, I will be ensconced in a booth on the second floor at the WanDa Guangchang Pizza Hut, sipping lukewarm lemon water, awaiting the arrival of my very own personal pan pizza. Maybe pepperoni? Maybe just cheese? Oh, the world will be my oyster. (I don’t believe oyster is a topping choice, but I am pretty sure there are a few other seafood options available for the native diner at a Chinese Pizza Hut.)

It will be worth the wait.

Goodbye Bonbons, Hello PB&J

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After a year of self-imposed temporary retirement, my days of lounging on the couch and eating Bonbons are coming to an end.  (Okay, there were no Bonbons consumed over the course of the last twelve months, but there was a lot of reading, writing and random wandering in the DC metro area, as well as a few less thrilling days filled with boredom and doubt. Luckily, the down days were few and more nostalgic than depressing.) Soon, as in Monday, it is time for me to rejoin the full-time workforce that powers our great nation. Granted, I am joining that forty-hour-a-week club on a different continent, but it is in the service of the Homeland, so I can soon commiserate with everyone else looking forward to weekend each Monday morning.

While my re-entry isn’t into the world of education (a topic about which I am having very mixed emotions), it is in a capacity that will allow me to be deeply involved in our new community and hopefully create some of the same connections with people that I was able to do teaching. I will be the CLO (community liaison officer) for the Chengdu Consulate. This means that I will work to help officers and families make the transition to their new home, work to create a great morale at the post, provide information about schools in the area, as well as event planning and (heaven forbid it is needed) crisis management on behalf of the families.

My brain (and notebook) have been in overdrive the last few weeks as I have been trying to glean as much information as possible from the outgoing CLO. She is a treasure-trove of knowledge about everything in this city. She can point an officer or family member in the right direction for anything from simple tailoring needs to wherein town to go to get an entire costume created. She can tell someone where to go to get a picture framed and then turn around and office advice to someone else on the best place to find a turkey for a special dinner. The woman is a walking Rolodex for Chengdu! Needless to say, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of having to create all of those connections myself, but luckily she has been kind enough to introduce me to many of her contacts and to take me on a variety of field trips to various sections of town.  She is leaving behind some rather large shoes to fill, but with my predilection for footwear, I am hoping I’ve got something in the closet that will sparkle and shine!

Monday morning, the year-long vacation comes screeching to halt. It might be a little painful when Thad’s alarm goes off and I actually have to roll out of bed, rather than give him a slight nudge to get him moving and then sprawl diagonally across the vastness of an entire bed to myself. And, in a few weeks I may be seeing the grass as greener on the unemployed side of the fence, but for now, I am excited to rejoin the workforce, to pack my peanut butter sandwich each morning and to actually contribute a few dead presidents to our bank account each month.

What exactly have I done with my year off? I have been…

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