It's a girl!

That's right ... we are officially a family of four as Lillie is now legally our daughter. Anne, Scott, and Lillie have criss-crossed China this week and all that's left is to get her U.S. documents (hopefully tomorrow). More to come once we get back to Shanghai this weekend.

What time is it?

Often in hotels, airports, museums, and maybe trendy restuarants you'll see a series of clocks with various times from major cities around the world. Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Hong Kong, etc. tend to be popular choices to represent the time zones that dot the globe.

Today we went into one of places we frequent for haircuts, massages, pedicures, etc. and noticed they had done a little remodeling. A fresh coat of paint and new accessories adorned the friendly salon. One of the more curious new additions was a series of three clocks above a doorway. Sidney and Shanghai occupied the two clocks on the left, which makes sense because the employees are all Chinese and many of the clientele hail from either the U.S. or Australia. The third clock, however, contained a very interesting choice to represent time zones in the U.S. ... Boise. Now, we don't know about you, but we can honestly say no matter where we've been, we have NEVER scratched our heads and thought, "Man, I wonder what time it is in Idaho right now."

Newspaper Models

We cancelled our subscription to the english language paper, Shanghai Daily, when we thought we were moving back to the U.S., so it took about half a day and a barrage of phone calls for Annie to realize that a picture of she and girls taken last fall was part of a 1/3 page article on Wednesday.

They volunteered to be models in a fashion show for charity last fall and the spring version of the fair is coming up soon ... thus the article in the "Life" section of the paper.

Let's just say Juliet REALLY enjoyed showing off the newspaper to her friends at school today, and Mr. Chen wanted a copy to show his friends that his boss made the newspaper. Here's the link to the online version of the picture and article:

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=396892&type=Feature

More Pig Pancreas Please!

A few months ago we announced that we were moving back to Dallas. So for the last 6 weeks Scott has been living in Texas and Annie has been preparing in Shanghai for our move home. This week, however, Scott was asked by his company to instead move back to Shanghai and take a new role back on the other side of the world.

So for those of you looking forward to this blog switching over to the "Texas Tales" or the "Barbeque Biographies" we apologize, as it appears our escapades in the country on the other side of the Pacific will continue. We just couldn't pass up the thought of being able to munch on fried minnows or sip seal penis wine for another few years!