Disaster zone

Recently Shanghai had its heaviest snowfall in 50 years. The kids loved it and we made snowmen, an igloo and snow angels. The most dramatic thing for me personally occurred when the roof of a very large warehouse my company operates collapsed under the weight of the snow. The warehouse was full of flat screen TVs, computers, cell phones, refrigerators, stoves and microwaves. It was right before Chinese New Year, the busy season for our customer, which exacerbated the disaster. I ended up spending about a week of very long days and late nights out at the warehouse organizing a recovery effort which involved hiring demolition and recovery crews, renting giant cranes to pull the scraps of roof off and finding trucks and new warehouse space to move the salvageable stuff into. It was high drama with millions of dollars of damage and plenty of screaming Chinese people. In law school or forestry school I never imagined I’d find myself in an industrial zone outside of Shanghai in the middle of a snowstorm wearing a hard hat while climbing around on rubble and remnants of plasma TVs.

Flower markets

Today after stopping in at a design company to look over some plans for a new office we’re moving into I stopped in at the Hongqiao flower market to get some flowers for Jenny, today being Valentines Day. The flower markets here are fantastic, particularly if you’ve got botanical leanings. There are quasi-wholesale markets in different parts of town with a huge variety of plants and flowers. I love just wandering around in them. The orchids are the best part for me. They have long been my favorite flowers – the colors, the shapes, the symmetries. In college when working on a paper for an evolutionary biology class I remember checking out this book by Charles Darwin on orchid pollination and evolution. It had been there for probably 20 years and it had been checked out maybe twice before! Anyway, orchids, cut flowers and plants are cheap in China so I load up.

New Addition

Our new addition arrived on Friday morning. He weighed in at 10 pounds 2 ounces, 20 inches, a bit of hair, healthy, happy. From Jenny's point of view, it was the best birthing experience she's had compared to the other births in the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S. Great doctors, nurses, hospital, etc. Everyone's a bit tired, but doing very well.