Chris’ Blog

Have you ever noticed how the intro of “Rudolph the Red-nosed-reindeer” goes:

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixon,
Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzon.
But do you recall the most famous reindeer of all?

That’s kind of a stupid question isn’t it?
Think about it.

Yesterday, Christine took me to buy my Christmas present, a new digital camera to replace the one that was stolen in Beijing. It’s great! I got a Canon Ixus 50 (SD400 in Canada) to replace the Pentax Optio S. So far, it seems to be an improvement over the Pentax, except the red-eye is quite bad and it doesn’t fit inside the Altoids tin. I’ll need to find a slightly larger candy for a case. Here’s a picture of me taken with the new camera.

We had our first Christmas in Shanghai. We had two friends over and Christine made a great supper (we had chicken instead of turkey) and we put up our Christmas tree with our friends. It was their first time decorating a tree, but they learned pretty fast and soon it was me who was being told what to do.

It was also their first Chritmas dinner. In this department, however, there was no chance of them meeting my skill in one evening. We had chicken with cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes (they were white!), two kinds of stuffing, and some healthy stuff that I was obligated to eat as well. We finished it off with pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Christine could only find graham wafer crust. We wondered why we’d never before had pumpkin pie with a graham wafer crust. Now we know.

Yesterday, while making my way to work on my bicycle I was rear ended by a guy on a scooter. I had stopped for a red light, which apparantly, was completey unexpected to the fellow behind me. He ran into me, I screamed, and the dust settled. I made a quick inspection of my bicycle and there was no visible damage. The guy gave me an apologetic look and that was about it.

On the rest of the ride there was the sound of a cricket chirping following me around and something must have been shook loose in my bell because it rang everytime I drove over a bump.

Good times.