John News

I haven’t updated this blog in a really long time, but I think some of you follow it by email, is that right? Please let me know.

Mom? Grace? Amy? Brad? Micah? Hathai? Illy? Let me know…

There aren’t many Christmas songs we’re not sick of by 2022, and of course Mariah Carey is the most nauseating at this point. Here are 4 songs my family and I enjoyed this holiday season:

Light of Christmas by Owl City / Toby Mac

Mistletoe by Justin Bieber

Christmas Tree Farm by Taylor Swift

Mary’s Boy Child by Boney M

2022 was another train wreck of a year… Some really great stuff came out of the chaos, but it’s hard to not feel sucker-punched by 2022. I thought it might be good to just sum up some of the major things that happened.

1. Although it was growing strong as late as October 2021, my main business AllSet Learning was hurting by the end of 2021. Over the 2022 CNY holiday, I knew I had some hard decisions to make.
2. In May 2022 I accepted a full-time position as an IB high school English teacher at bilingual school in Shanghai called Qibao Dwight.
3. I spent summer 2022 transitioning so that my small team of full-time staff at AllSet Learning (and the part-timers at Mandarin Companion, to a lesser extent) could learn to keep operating without my daily involvement.
4. I got away to Sanya (beach resort in the south) with my kids at the end of July, and ended up getting away just before there was a COVID lockdown there. Close call!
5. Fall 2022 was pretty rough, as I learned how to be an IB teacher, how to be a high school teacher, how to be a full-time classroom teacher… and also continued to keep my businesses going on the side, as best I could.
6. The kids, meanwhile, were able to enjoy the main perk of my new job: they could start school at an international school (all classes except Chinese class) in English. It’s called SCIS and follows the IB curriculum. They love their new school. (Less homework, smaller classes, and class is more fun.)
7. This is a bit of a one-way road… now that they’ve started at an international school, their grades cannot be transferred back to the Chinese curriculum. So they need to keep going to an international school as long as they’re living in Shanghai.
8. With the exception of the little trip to Sanya, we’ve done almost no traveling (anywhere in China) throughout 2022. This is really chafing at us! I haven’t been to the US since my dad’s funeral in January 2019. The rest of my family hasn’t been to the US since Christmas 2018. Mom, Grace, and Ella visited us in Shanghai for Christmas 2019, before COVID hit in 2020. Those three moved to Atlanta in 2020, so none of my family has seen the new place either.
9. My whole family got COVID in December 2022, starting with Alana staying home Dec. 13th because she felt unwell (it was her last week of school before her school’s winter break). I got sick Dec. 15th, followed shortly by Shen. We were pretty much all sick that weekend of Dec. 17-18, and it was bad. Isaac never actually tested positive, and if he got sick at all, it was a light case. Although we’re all negative again, we’re still sort of “recovering.” It was not “just a cold;” it was a bad flu (unless you’re Isaac, in which case it was nothing).
10. We had a nice family Christmas at home. Presents-wise, the kids were happy. Shen and I treated ourselves to a nice new mattress (overdue!), a night at the movies (Avatar 2), and fancy Japanese-style toilet seats. Wow, wild and crazy living…

So we are SOOOO THANKFUL that China is finally putting COVID behind it, filing it away in those horrible years labeled “2020-22”. We have plans for a family trip to Yunnan during the CNY holiday, and we’ll be visiting the US again (finally!) in summer 2023!

I’m very sad to say that our two budgies, Pear and Feifei, both left us this week, within a few days of each other.

Pear had gotten progressively weaker over a few days, and we didn’t know what was going on or realize how serious it was. Then a few days ago the poor little guy fell to the floor of his cage and could barely move. Alana held him gently in her hand and stroked him, but he didn’t last more than another hour or so. (I hope Alana’s gesture was comforting to him in his final moments.)

Then this morning the same thing happened to Feifei, only in fast-forward. She succumbed much faster (she was rather old for a budgie).

We buried both birds in the garden inside of our complex.

From Googling, I can only guess that the birds got some kind of disease. Apparently paralysis in this kind of bird is common. In the US it might have been possible to get treatment from an avian veterinarian, but I doubt that Shanghai has such services.

Frost, our cockatiel (left), seems to be doing just fine. We won’t get any new birds for a while, and clean the cage thoroughly. Hopefully that will get rid of any germs. In the meantime, Alana can train Frost a lot better. (Lonely birds are easier to train.)

Both of these were introduced to me by Jeremy.

#1: Pancho & Lefty by Townes Van Zandt.

#2: Change by Big Thief

the style of Change makes me think of Illy’s songs. Not sure exactly why.

I’m pretty sure I discovered this in college, around 1998. probably downloaded it on Napster or Limewire or something. Anyway, it came up in a chat with Jeremy today, so I just want to post these YouTube videos here for convenience. (If you happen to know anything about this artist, I’d be interested to learn what you know! as far as I know he released a few songs in the 90’s in this style and then disappeared. But I enjoy this stuff.)

Oh, and if you don’t like it, that’s cool… I don’t know your judgment. :D

I haven’t updated this site in a while. I suppose I should… kid photos at least??

I’m writing this update just as a test that my server migration is successful and functional.

Sorry it’s so boring! Kids next time…

Love this pop song! Not sure how popular it is; got randomly recommended it on WeChat by a friend.

Then, randomly, our stupid Chinese virtual assistant “Xiao i” couldn’t understand our commands and played the wrong song, called “Maybe,” which also turned out to be pretty good!

In 2020 I made good progress at both my AllSet Learning business and my Mandarin Companion business. From a personal standpoint, I lost about 20 pounds and started getting into working out. Big success!

A owe a big part of that success to a new habit I started (and stuck with) in 2020: Habit Tracking. I use a Google Doc Sheet to track my daily habits. Some are just binary “0” or “1” values (which I use conditional formatting to color code), while others track other numbers. Those “other numbers” include my daily weight. I didn’t record it every single day, but when I missed a day or two (and I frequently skipped weekends altogether), I filled in the gap with the average of the day(s) before and after the gap. Worked pretty well.

So here’s my weight graph for all of 2020:

The gray line is the actual weight numbers, while the blue line is an average of the past 10 days. Using this average is super useful. You can see how it’s far less erratic. When you suddenly gain a few pounds in one day, that blue line doesn’t flinch. This is encouraging; when you’re focused on the 10-day average, you know you can get the weight back down and keep the trend going.

“Holiday break” means I’m not going to the gym (for all of December, and part of January so far), and doing some exercise at home (pushups, etc.). I’m giving myself permission to be a little lazy for the coldest months of the winter, and the holiday season. But I’m not giving up this new habit. And I’ll be rejoining a new gym probably next week which focuses more on free weights, meaning I can start StrongLifts 5x5 program in earnest. I’m pretty excited about that.

Anyway, the point of this post is to encourage family and friends to try habit tracking. It’s really easy. You can use this Google Docs template or a local spreadsheet.

Here are some ideas for what habits to track:

https://jamesclear.com/habit-tracker

https://www.developgoodhabits.com/habit-tracker-ideas/

https://thepetiteplanner.com/101-habit-tracker-ideas-to-improve-your-life/

Happy 2021!