catching up with reporting about life

Wow, it's almost the end of October and I haven't blogged once since the start of last month. That's almost a full two-months-long absence. No faithful reader voiced any complaints though, but I'll like to keep this going for posterity's sake. Petra's napping right now, but a strange elephantine groaning just started outside our building, so whatever I write right now will have to be quick.

Lots of things have happened. Such as...

1. A friend from Israel came to visit for the last two weeks of September, acting essentially as a guinea pig for all future visitors since I was (am) still fairly unfamiliar with this area myself, plus I had (have) a family of foreigners who were (are) still coping from culture and various other sorts of shock. Emily was a pretty good sport and after having checked out the notable features of this particular city (Eighteen Peaks Mountain, the old East Gate, the City God Temple, Declan's kindergarten...), she arranged a week in Taipei with some family friends.

I eventually got better at this hosting thing and took her south to Kaohsiung, which is a city I'm far more familiar with and from there on, I learned that there are actually a lot of private citizen-bloggers who do a pretty good job of introducing more off-the-beaten-path sites worthy of visiting all around Taiwan. One of them was some mud volcanoes in the town of Yanchou, which is also famous for its guava. I was secretly impressed by myself for finding a way to get us there without a car. (We got there via a train ride to Nanzi station, then public bus #7 to Kaohsiung Normal University's Yanchou campus, then a 20-minute walk from the school's back gate to the mud volcano nature reserve and surrounding mountains.)

Emily also eventually visited Tainan before heading back to Israel with a stop in California. She saw killer bees, macaque monkeys, and packs of semi-feral dogs. I also introduced her to stinky tofu, octopus balls, and other Taiwanese "small eats". Hopefully, the good memories from this visit will only age like vintage wine, and she'll forget about the few times I snapped at her the way I snapped at everyone around me when the kids were running wild. I was mortified and then really glad that she brought up how much it bothered her. It was a huge wake-up call for me to examine how I deal with the stresses of raising the kids. No excuses for bad behavior.

2. Somewhere down the road, I decided I needed to start spending some serious quiet time every day with God, and to make that a priority. I pledged, for one week, to wake up earlier to read the Bible and pray, which also meant that I have had to stop going to bed at 2am or 3am. So now I go to bed around 11pm and wake around 6:40am, and I also started alternating between running or swimming for 30 minutes after the intentional time with God and before I must start the day of child-caring and home-running. It's been about two weeks now, and I really appreciate this routine. I'm really going to miss it when Daniel goes to Italy for two weeks next month and I won't be able to run or swim for that period of time since otherwise there won't be anyone watching the kids while I'm gone. Sigh.

3. I was finally able to visit prisoners at the Taipei Detention Center. For a few weeks now, I've heard about the work of the Taiwan Foreign Inmates Caring Association by a missionary that partners with them. At this point, I'm far more familiar with the prison system in the US than in my home country since I've actually worked for two semesters with lifers at men's maximum security prisons in the US. As for Taiwan, the still very great rigidity of the social classes meant that my family's circles rarely came into contact or hears about those who end up in prison and their conditions. The day of the visit, I almost begged off by using taking care of Petra and needing to pick up Declan as an excuse because I was nervous and unsure about what to expect. The fact that most of the workers who care for the foreign inmates long-term have expressed so much criticism and disgust at my government also made me uneasy. Daniel insisted that I go, however, and arrangements were made for Petra's nap time and Declan's pick up. What took place at prison deserves its own blog entry; suffice it to say I'm so glad I went and I long for another chance to go, and perhaps go consistently. There is no doubt in my mind that the people in prison, no matter what they've done, need compassion too.

I've been Facebook-free for over two months now, and I love not partaking of this social media anymore. There are lots of loonies on Google+ as well, but somehow I'm not as bothered since it's not all that popular with my circle of friends. I think I would still have been better friends with a lot of people I know if I hadn't been exposed to things and thoughts they've shared on Facebook, and that probably goes both ways. Which is really sad.

Life is such a changeling thing. From one angle, it all seems so important and significant; from another angle, it's all completely fleeting and interchangeable. Yet both perspectives are true. How strange.

My family, nuclear and otherwise