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Our family will make five soon and while Yang always wanted three kids, I had my doubts. Mainly around the numbers. Think about this: Five means longer waits at restaurants for a table. Five means two hotel rooms instead of two queen beds in one room. Five means two taxis or someone sitting on a lap. Five means a bigger car. Five means 2x2x1 seating on plane rides. Five means three bicycles instead of two w/kids seats. Five means a three bedroom house instead of two bedroom and forget about a den. And the topper ...

What is a man’s form of nesting? I’ve been wanting to buy some things for a few weeks now. Some out of need (cell phone, bike bag), some out of vanity (tee shirts), some out of obsession (head phones), and some out of insanity (R9 honda scooter). I was able to accomplish nearly all of these goals, minus the scooter which Yang told me was pure insanity in Beijing and if I were to be that insane the least I could do is buy a real bike. This way our kids would have some semblance of pride in describing their father’s death (“Well, you see, he was crossing on his scooter sanyuanqiao when his murse got entangled with a taxi’s mirror and the subsequent fall from the overpass led to his death”). ...

I read that the elusive northern passage was first navigated last summer due to global warming. Seems the ice in the Arctic melted enough that a ship could make it through without incident. The European explorers tried 600 years too early. When we moved to Lido, I looked on google earth to see how far away my office was and what the best path to it. The map revealed something interesting. We live just outside of the 4th ring road on the northeast corner of town and my office is on what is essentially 3.5 ring road in the northwest section. In my mind’s eye, I would bike directly west and then drop down south to reach my office. Instead, Google Maps revealed that my office is directly west of our home. This would be great if I was a bird. And since I am not a bird and even if I was, likely I would not be of the flying variety. Given these facts, I needed to find a roads. The problem is google earth did not show the perfect path and all the maps here are in chinese. ...

As Beijing makes its final Olympic preparations, we are making ours. Our major Olympic event will be the birth of child number three, with the tentative English name of Melissa Anne Allio and a Chinese name of 巢 where the first character is Yang’s Chao and the 2nd isn’t something I quite have a handle on yet. In addition to number three’s arrival, I do have a single Olympic ticket, for the closing ceremonies. Here is the story of how “easy” it was to obtain such a ticket. But first, a couple of Aidan/Lydia pictures just for fun. ...

I am five or six or seven or eight and in the swimming pool at South San Francisco High School, learning to swim, being rolled onto my back and flapping my arms unwilling to trust in buoyancy. I guess I should say five and six and seven and eight as I learned and failed every year took the same lessons and every year I flunked until they gave up and promoted me to the next level. That first level was called “sand flies” and the second level “dunkers”. I didn’t enroll in dunkers and I officially became a swimming school dropout. ...

It’s raining cats and dogs or antelopes and deer and I wonder if I will ever fall asleep. I flip on CNN and read the latest “breaking” news where breaking means “recent”. They used to just call that — well — news. I’ve been having a hard time sleeping lately if consider lately the past 10 years or so. I want to blame it on my job or too much caffeine or life stress or what not. But maybe it is just they way I am. One night every few weeks I will barely sleep at all…scratch that two nights but one of the two is chemically induced. The lack of sleep makes me tired during the day and makes me stress over things that are not so stressful which causes me to sleep less and so on. You get the picture. Circles create their own momentum. ...

It is 8:30am Saturday morning and Yang and I head to AmCare, the children’s and maternity hospital across the street from us. It is so close that having Yang walk there when labor comes seems like a reasonable option. It certainly seems safer than having her drive which she may end up wanting to do. An aside: In the states, I was the clearly the better driver. We go anywhere in the car, there was no doubt it was me driving. Here, well, I can’t say Yang’s driving has improved but her driving “fits” more with the rest of the drivers. Mine can seem like a nervous teenager by comparison. ...

She wondered what good she would be to him unless she allowed him to break her. She liked who she was and after so many years of struggle had finally found her center even if her center was destined to be off kilter. But she knew her cynicism and wicked mouth and fruit-tarian like diet and obsessive rocking out to music would drive him away. So she made the conscious decision to change. To change for him. Even if that meant taking a risk and losing the sense of herself. Again. And she had not forgotten how much work it took to get her sense of self back the last time. ...

We are not the type of family that works out everything out in advance. Take the case of Aidan’s and Lydia’s pre-school. When we moved to Lido we did not have a new school lined up for them. Yang did some initial research and didn’t find a school to our liking. Either not local hire friendly (read expensive, unless you have a fat expat packages) or too local. For a few weeks Yang drove the kids to their Chaoyangmen Wai school called Sanliturn kindergarten. The 30-60 minute drive each way was far from perfect. ...

The food comes and he says nothing. They laugh when the kung pao chicken arrives and he obliges by calling it the lao wai chicken. They can tell he is bored so they ask if he wants beer to drink but he says no. He only drinks alone when he is alone and not when he’s not. This he has learned from a Dennis Lehane novel. He realizes he’s being an ass by sitting and not eating much and talking even less. But he is the only foreigner there and even with foreigners he can’t stand to make small talk. When was the last time he had a good conversation about his hometown sport teams, or a good movie, or some music he likes. He is drifting in a world he doesn’t understand and worse yet doesn’t want to understand. And certainly a world that does not want to understand him. The knowledge he’s gained from being part of this culture for three years has only pushed him further from his culture while simultaneously closing doors into this one. He wants to sit and rock to his music, maybe Pink’s mizunderstood playing “just like a pill” loud and twice. ...