What's Up With M'Boys

You might not believe it.

I came home from Taiwan to find that Son the Younger (hereafter referred to as StY because it takes too long to type Son the Younger and I'm not telling you his name) had colored his hair back to its natural state.

Crazy, I know. But wait, there's more!

He had also decided that it was time for a haircut. After trying a couple of times to get it into his schedule (or into the schedule of his hairdresser), he decided I should do it.

Oh noes!

Now, I haven't cut the boy's hair since, well, since a really long time ago. I'm pretty sure it was a single digit age (he's 15 now). He's a lot more particular about his hair now than he was the last time I cut it, so I was a little nervous about getting it done to his liking.

After I got one side done, his brother (a.k.a. Son the Older) told him he should go with the half and half look, just to be nutty, just for a day. Naturally, StY thought that sounded like a great idea. Here it is in the halfway, still wet form.


Once he got it dried, he decided he liked it, and I was a little afraid he was going to just leave it half short and half long. It's his hair, and it's something I don't fight with him about -- it's just not worth it -- but he's been through so many hair colors that I thought it would be healthier to cut it off and start over.

Fortunately for his hair, after he thought about it, he agreed.

I cut it short but left it a tiny bit longer along the midline for faux-hawk fun. Doesn't he look fierce?

This was my first faux-hawk; I actually did better the second time around, but I didn't take pictures then, so this is the only evidence.

In other Son news, I've also reached that point in life that every mother both dreads and looks forward to: in about two weeks, Son the Older leaves for college. Several people have asked how I feel about that. I think I'm probably in denial. I know he'll have a great time and come into his own in a lot of ways, and I look forward to that for him. But I will certainly miss him.

I do have to reply to something my sister said on her blog. She posted a very cute pic of my nephew with the comment, "Another adorable picture of my boy. I mean, should I just be enrolling him in college, or what? He looks so old in this picture!"

No, hon. This is the face of someone you should be enrolling in college.

Ouch, huh?

When I showed him your blog, his comment was, "Yes, yes, enroll me in college. Send me out into the REAL world. See how THAT works!"

He insists he intended it as a commentary on his unshaven appearance, but it's a great photo caption.

I love you, son. Take the world by storm.

Excellent Birthaversary Weekend

So, this week has been "interesting"...

My left foot and ankle were swollen and painful the entire time I was in Taiwan, so I headed to the doc as soon as I was back home. She wasn't sure of the cause but put me on anti-inflammatories twice a day. Even though I've taken them on a full stomach every time, they have not been gentle to me, to the point that a very nice dinner out was pretty well ruined last night. So I'll be calling my doctor back to see what can be done tomorrow.

But on a more pleasant note, the reason I was out for such a nice dinner, at one of my favorite places, was to celebrate my birthday and anniversary, which happen to fall on the same day. In years when either is significant, hubby doesn't get away with just a nice dinner, but this year isn't a big deal.

We went with friends who brought me a lovely birthday gift. Or hilarious, at least. He/she/it is handmade. What should I name him?


Today we went to Pei Wei for dinner. My tummy is feeling much better since I got all rebellious and decided to take Aleve rather than the prescribed stuff. After dinner we decided it was high time to check out the alleged best bubble tea in Austin!

I didn't have my camera with me at the time, so this is the best I could do once I got home. Sorry the glass is only half full. *blush*

I'd give this milk tea with bubbles about an 8.5/10 on the scale where a 10 was the bubble tea place by my hotel. Pretty good, but the flavor isn't quite as good, and I prefer the smaller bubbles. I may have to break down and make my own, since I was given my own supply of small bubbles before I left.

What about you? What's your favorite beverage? Where do you buy it?

Farewell to Taiwan

Yes, I know, I've been home since late Friday night (or early Saturday morning, depending on how you like to call it). But I still have a few more pictures, so this will be my last Taiwan post.

Pathetic, I know. Stuck for a topic in my drab daily life? Why, yes!

The lovely ladies in sales took me out for lunch on Thursday, my last full day in Taiwan. In keeping with my usual policy of respecting the privacy of my co-workers, there will not be a picture of the beautiful ladies, probably much to the chagrin of any male readers I might have.

I didn't take individual pictures of all the dishes, but it was quite the smorgasbord for just the four of us: dumplings, soup, veggies, hand-cut pasta, and a roll with beef and green onions. Seriously, you never leave a table hungry in this country.


I did take a separate picture of the dumplings, since they simply didn't fit in the previous picture. The entire lunch was delicious, but as usual, there was far more food than could be eaten by the people present. In this case, there were three tiny Asian women and me. The food won.

When I got back to my hotel Thursday evening, I noticed these little guys sitting on a sideboard. Somehow I'd missed them for the last week and a half. You couldn't look at them without smiling, so I thought I'd bring back a picture of them.

I also brought back something else to the hotel to make me smile. Yep, that's right -- this is the best bubble tea in Taiwan, at least as far as I discovered. Yum! Now I have to try all the places in Austin to see if anything comes remotely close to this. They even gave me a purple straw.

On Friday, there was some fairly serious rain near the hotel. It turns out it's pretty hard to get a decent picture of rain if you're not willing to get your camera out in it, which I wasn't. I took several pictures, and this was the best of the bunch. The rain was heavy enough that the resulting water was up over the curbs and almost into the shops near the hotel... but when I got to work, it wasn't raining at all, nor did I see rain the rest of the day, including in Taipei for my flight out. Go figure. 'Round these parts we'd call that a "locally heavy storm."

We got a tiny little shower today thanks to Dolly, but nothing like that picture. I would have been happy with more, as dry as this summer has been, but I'm grateful for what we got today.

The Big Dinner Out

OK y'all, this is another monster long post with lots of pictures. There are a few more loose ends I need to tie up, but this will be the last big bunch of stuff.

Before I get into the big bunch o' food pictures, I have to post the picture that I was trying to get almost the entire time I was there. There were two types of traffic timers that I saw while I was in Taiwan. One showed the number of seconds until the red light turned greed. The other showed the number of seconds until the walk signal turned to don't walk. The walk signal came complete with a little animated green walking guy (who starts moving faster as time counts down). I finally manged to get both timers in one picture -- woohoo!


On my next to last evening in Taiwan, the group organized a large dinner out. Lots of people were invited -- my entire work group, my manager and his manager, the key managers from other areas, and a lot of the people I'll be working closely with. There were fourteen people there in all, and we were given a large private room with two large round tables.

Then the food -- Shanghai style -- started arriving. By this time I'd been to enough meals to know that I should just sample a bite or two of each item -- otherwise I'd be stuffed long before the last items were brought out. I followed that rule, and still I was stuffed by the end!

They told me the items on the first platter were "drunk chicken" and "meat with jelly." Both were tasty, although I preferred the chicken.

Next up were some spicy vegetables (on the left) and jellyfish (on the right). The vegetables were quite spicy but the perfect crunchiness. The jellyfish was the texture you'd expect jellyfish to be -- not my usual fare, but not bad.

The next course delivered was soup. It had a fair amount of cilantro (my least favorite herb) in it, but as long as I ate around the cilantro, it was delicious. It was delivered in one of the biggest bowls I've ever seen, and we did a pretty good job of eating it.

Next was shrimp, tofu and veggies -- yum! (No, I didn't eat much of the tofu...)

The dish below is duck in sauce with vegetables. If I've ever eaten duck before, it's only been once or twice. Like almost everything I ate in Taiwan, it was delicious.

This platter is lamb. It was a challenge to eat with chopsticks (as were a few things I ate), but it was really yummy. But wow, I was getting really full by this time, even eating just one or two bites of each item!

These are dim sum dumplings. I didn't try one since I was so full. I know I love dumplings, so I'm sure they were amazing.

Next: more soup! This was chicken soup -- as in, whole pieces of chicken. Quite tasty!

The next item to be brought out was fried lotus, apparently. Again, I skipped it since I was so full. They were quite large, about the size of a fist, and it just seemed like a lot of food at that pont.

Dessert was delivered next, and I was told that this would be the last item. Dessert soups are quite common in Taiwan. This one, like most, was served cool and was slightly sweet. You can see the pasta-like stuff in it, as well as the olive-sized things which may be fruits of some kind. All good stuff.

My neighbor was mistaken, of course -- there were multiple desserts. The second dessert was purple rice pie. I told him that my family made poppyseed cake that looked just like this. He seemed surprised. I didn't try one, since I was quite full.

The VERY LAST platter was watermelon and guava. I did have one slice of guava. I love me some tropical fruit!

And that's the end of my big night out. I have a few pictures left to share of my last lunch out and of the rain (some people called it a typhoon, but I think that may be an exaggeration from where I was), and that will conclude my Taiwan monologue. Of course, if I left any questions unanswered, please leave me a comment and I'll be happy to address it.

Pictorial Randomness

I have some cleaning up to do, and some rambling to do about some pictures. Unfortunately, I have more than one day's worth of pictures to ramble about. I'll keep them in separate posts for sanity's sake.

I'm sad to say that these pictures are now a week old. Bad blogger! No donut!

The first three pictures are of a snack we had one afternoon. Everyone was treated to a snack of ice and fruit (at least, I think it was fruit of some sort). We were all given our cup of ice and fruit, plus one of the small creamer things like you get with a cup of coffee. Here's what it looked like pre-cream. I think one of the guys said that the orange things are a relative of sweet potatoes, but they didn't taste similar to me. I liked the orange things and the off-white things, but the black jelly-like stuff was less to my liking.


Here it is after pouring the cream in. You pour it in and stir it up. Although it doesn't look that appetizing, it's pretty good.

Here it is all stirred up and ready to eat. It's all kind of a gray mush thanks to the black jelly stuff. Still tastes good though.

Also, I thought since I had some litchi (which is apparently the correct spelling), I would show it to y'all. And make Janet, my Taiwanese friend, hungry. So here it is on the branch.

You peel off the rind before you eat it. That's a lot easier to do when it's room temp; the rind gets a lot more brittle after refrigeration. Oh well. It tastes yummy refrigerated.

More peeling, more of the litchi exposed. Trying to let y'all in on the process!

Here is our litchi all ready to eat. Yum!

After you pop your yummy snack in your mouth, this is what you have left -- the pit.

Yep, it's kind of a labor intensive fruit, but certainly no worse than, say, an orange. And quite tasty!

Little Bumpy on Re-Entry

I know, I owe you guys some pictures and some posts. I've been very bad since I got back to Texas.

I slept a record 15 hours on Saturday, was up just long enough for some Tex-Mex with friends Saturday night, then crashed again. After church on Sunday, I was pooped again and took a far longer nap than I should have. I was up later than I should have been last night, so my sleep schedule is still messed up.

I'm going to try to get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight so I can get myself straightened out. My sister told me (having heard it from several of her colleagues who travel extensively in Asia) that jet lag coming back to the States is much tougher than jet lag going there. I'm feeling it.

So yes, I still have more stories and pictures to share with you, and I will try to do that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day, after all.

The Airport, It Is My Life

Or at least it feels that way right now.

I made it back to the U.S., which was a relief considering the weather in Taiwan -- actually, the typhoon weakened and stayed south, so it wasn't an issue at all.

Unfortunately, once I retrieved my bags to go through customs (managing to spill the entire contents of my purse all over the baggage claim area in the process, because I'm graceful like that), I discovered that my flight to Austin is delayed. That 25 minutes may not sound like much, but tacked onto an 18-hour odyssey, it feels like forever.

I had a little girl (about age six or seven) sitting behind me on the flight playing games on the touch screen for the entire flight from Taipei to LA. It's 4am body time and she's punching away at the back of my head, essentially. I got up once and asked her to take it easy. That lasted about two, maybe three minutes, then she was back at it. I don't sleep on planes under the best of conditions, even with Ambien, but I think I actually dozed for a half hour or so. Right now it's 9am body time and my brain is pretty well fried. I keep typing words I don't intend to type.

Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to seeing Austin at the other end of this flight. Specifically, seeing my hubby, my boys, and the insides of my eyelids as I fall into my own bed. I owe y'all some pictures -- and hopefully some of the ones I took of the "typhoon" (or rain, really) came out too. But I doubt you'll hear from me again until sometime late tomorrow at the earliest.

I had a fabulous first trip to Asia, and even if the re-entry is a little rough, I will jump at the chance to go again. What a great bunch of peeps!

More later, when I can type coherently again. Or more coherently, at least.