Long Hiatus Oct 25, 2009

So to the faithful my apologies. I have been traveling and moving to a new apartment and things have been slightly hectic. So travels were to the U.S. and a little within China. Surprised my boy at his wedding. Yes, I am awesome and let me tell ya Mississippi and Cali know how to party. Work has picked up and I’m traveling once a week at least to Tianjin since our last communiqué. You know what this means, expense reports, I have a back log from freaking august. I hate that crap. If anyone can come up with an easier way to do expense report rather than this paper and receipt B.S, please let me know.

So I guess the apartment, well it’s a pretty good apartment, I’m getting more and more used to it, but I will say that when that 8 month lease (yeah tricky little thing) runs out next june, I’m outta there. It just doesn’t feel right, and besides I want to live in different parts of Shanghaand learn the city you know. So this is my second location, the Bonus, 15 minute walk to work, ba12 minutes if I pick up the pace. I don't think I will describe teh apartment too much here, but the walls will be bare and you just have to come and visit me here to see what it's really like. you got 8 months.


Since I got back, what has happened so far? Well, the day after I got back from Stateside, I traveled to Tianjin, and the week after that we had an HSE audit at the factory in Tianjin. HSE = Health Safety and Environment. So a trained auditor comes to your factory and looks at the plant from operating, to financial, to HR to logistics, to document control to evaluate the amount of HSE risk that the plant poses to the worker, and the environment. So I was there to listen to the auditors and discuss with them any findings. Say if they found something, my job would be to see if the plant is justified in their actions or if the auditors are right. So I pretty much played devil’s advocate. In the end, the whole point is to make your plant safer, I could care less about the findings, let’s just get the fucker safe. And the audit went surprisingly well, the plant got a pretty high score, details obviously can’t be discussed here, but everyone’s happy, and for some retarded reason management is happy with me because of what I did at the audit. I have no idea what I did, but my bosses are smitten, I guess with these killa looks (albeit the gigantic nose, I guess it grows on ya (ha yes pun definitely intended (I hate myself)) who can resist. The good Lord has definitely been good to me. .

While we are here, let’s just do this. So religion is somewhat a pretty big part of my life and as such, I do believe that my success is really a blessing more than anything I have done myself. However, religion is a sensitive issue and my intention is not to force my beliefs on anyone, but I feel like a fraud if I don’t give credit where I believe it’s due. So is this the right forum to express my thoughts on the subject? well I’m not sure, but it’s there.

Right now I’m sitting on a plane to Tianjin and we’re waiting on “loading documents” and daddy has about 7 hours of sleep in the last 2 nights combined, I’m freaking dying here. Continue to this incoherent blog or fall asleep?

So after the last day of the audit, a few of us went to a Korean BBQ, now this was pretty cool. You get lots of raw meat, thinly sliced (vegetables and seafood are available if you like) and you sit around a hot grill and just throw those suckers on there. You get sauces to dip your meat in and lettuce to wrap it in. Time consuming, but great stuff. Our girl Elise did all the cooking and they definitely ordered some lamb kidneys (an aphordesiac for men apparently). Thank you but no thank you. Or how about some raw ground beef mixed with a raw egg? Umm isnt’ that just like eating a raw hamburger you ask? Xie xie ni ke shi bu yao. Whad up now pinyin?

Afterwards, there was a choice between going to the disco (read clubbing) or karaoke or KTV as it is known around here. So they ask me what I wanted to do and I left it upto them and they of course chose Karaoke. My second time ever and those of you know me describe my singing skills as oh how do you say it….oh yea that’s right Tone deaf. Now we had to lovely ladies I work with who can do a pretty decent job, one of the guys did a good job, and me and my man Dean well let’s just say there is now a new rendition of Hey Jude in the office. Oh dear. And of course there are lots of Chinese songs which are mainly love ballads, they dig this stuff here. And of course West Lift, Nsync, backtstreet boys and I found a horrifyingly eighties rap version of “we will rock You”. Overall, I can’t wait to do it again….one thing that made me realize is that how bad I got lyrics wrong in some songs that I used to sing along to. I am retarded.

During the move, I misplaced my camera so that sucks. Oh and my favorite person in the office just left us. His last day is oct29th. Sad day sad day. This weekend Ultimate tourney in Hong Kong. Holla.