What's New

Oops!! Long time no blog! I bet you are wondering what is happening in China. Well....it has been snowing this week and today it stuck to the ground. Tomorrow Abi has an official "snow day" because they are expecting freezing weather tonight and all that slush is going to get slippery.

The short story...

I have been to Japan and back, Tucker celebrated his 21st birthday, Abi had a basketball tournament, and Tim is in "end of quarter keep all the balls in the air" mode.

The weather

A friend told me that her driver said this is the first time in 17 years that snow has stuck to the ground in Shanghai. The whole country is experiencing bad weather and it has caused a drain on the power supplies. They are creating rolling blackouts through out the country to save power. Some of the blackouts are announce and some are not. This is causing problems with the factories as they do not know from day to day if they will have power. And....this includes HP's suppliers factories which is causing Tim a bit of stress. Abi is thrilled with the snow because she is forced to stay home from school tomorrow. The weather is causing more stress on the subway system so Tucker is experiencing even a bigger "crush" as he commutes to work. Our driver is very cautious and wanted us to leave 2 hours early for a 2o minute drive on Saturday. I convinced her this was not necessary, we left 30 minutes ahead of time and still arrived very early. I think the snow is great because it is covering all the dirt and makes the city look much cleaner. Today we had big fluffy flakes fall during my quilting class. It was beautiful.

Abi's Basketball tournament

Abi's team was seated number 2 going into the tournament. Their first game was a heart breaker as the other team scored at the buzzer which gave them a one point lead. The basket was called "no score" and our team cheered thinking they had won the game. Then the ref changed his mind and said the basket counted and then the other team cheered. Then....the refs talked about this for 30 minutes and finally decided in favor of the other team. This put Abi's team in the bottom bracket with the best possible outcome.....5th place. They played two more games and took 5th.

Abi's basketball team

Abi's number is 1

There she is again!

Tuckers 21st Birthday

Turning 21 in China is not as exciting as in the States....there is no drinking age here so "what is the big deal?" Tucker wanted Japanese food for his birthday dinner...sushi to be exact...so we went to a Japanese restaurant. I found this to be a bit funny because I just came back from Japan and was a little over done on the whole raw fish thing! Abi and I ate noodles.

Trip to Japan

I had a great time in Japan. It is so clean and organized compared to China. I like the sound of Japanese better than Chinese also. It is much more soothing than the tones in the Chinese language. The quilt festival was wonderful!!! Very inspirational. I bought a few Japanese fabrics.....some for quilts and some for a wall hanging. It was interesting to see the color trends in Japan. The fabrics were very muted and dull in color. This was very surprising. It reminded me of the 80's country colors. Yuk!!! This might have been a good thing because I was not tempted to buy any of these muted fabrics. I did manage to find a few notions and other fun things that I could not resist. :)

The promenade at the Tokyo Dome....The Christmas lights were still up and looked beautiful at night

Evelyn and Angeles

The Quilt Festival was held in The Tokyo Dome.....Outside the Dome were two security check points. All handbags were searched...we are not sure what they were looking for because they did not search very thoroughly.