Our First Wedding Anniversary and First Ultrasound

This is the first sneak-peek at the little anklebiter on the way. This is at almost 3 months, so it's too early to tell if it's a boy or a girl. Either one is fine with me, though if it's a girl I'd probably get high blood pressure because we all know how crazy people are for mixed-blood beauties in China :-/. Actually Chinese people are crazy for any babies, especially those who aren't Chinese, so I'll have to brush up on my kung fu defensive tactics to keep away the vultures.

Tina and I celebrated our one-year wedding anniversary on February 12th at Gu Lang Yu Island, which is a quaint historic island a few minutes off the coast of Xiamen island (about a seven minute ferry ride). It was fun taking a one-night vacation and still be able to see our building from across the bay :-). Our New Year's celebration was pretty low-key because Xiamen bans fireworks so the whole town basically becomes a ghost town for the weekend (instead of a war zone, which is the usual transformation most cities undergo during Spring Festival). We also lost precious hours of our life watching the Spring Festival broadcast on CCTV1, which everyone in China agrees was ultra-lame. I don't expect much but at least in the past the shows have been a bit of a spectacle, but this year's production was straight out of local variety show television. It was an epic fail.

I haven't gotten any new tattoo work done in over six months, and I think I'm gonna hang up the needle for awhile, probably until after the baby is born. Between mortgage, American debt (>:-/) and impending baby, I won't have too much spare cash to inject under my skin. But this isn't the end of the tattoo saga my friends, oh no...

I hope the new year finds you happy and healthy. Change is good, sometimes fun, never boring, and should be embraced.