Category Archives: Misc

I’d purchased the domain yjohny.com sometime in the late 2000s, and had been posting on it sporadically in English and Chinese for a couple of years when I discovered one day that the domain wasn’t working. I think this was sometime in 2010. Apparently I’d forgotten to renew it. I can’t remember exactly what happened, […]

Today is the third day of Christmas, so I guess my Christmas wishes aren’t all that late. We spent Christmas in Beijing this year. Catherine and I were both hampered by canker sores, so we didn’t do much talking, but we had a great day. After sleeping in, she went to the dentist and I […]

We just got back from a Meng Jinghui play starring Liu Xiaoye. It was a lot of fun, and made me want to find some sort of creative outlet. The play was all in Chinese except for a more-eccentric-than-Ringo performance of “Yellow Submarine”, but I think will still enjoyed it. I’m off to Shandong tomorrow […]

We had a great dinner last night with Catherine’s students, and Will and I played flag football in the afternoon. I’m looking forward to a relaxing weekend with nothing to do but maybe play basketball on Sunday.

I forgot to have a thought yesterday. I did have dinner with some interesting people and facilitate their work on an interesting project, but I still should have had a thought.

My brother Will arrived last night, and he’ll stay will us for the next couple of months. He’s been playing baseball in Lithuania, and blogging about his experiences here. We’re so excited to have him in town. Today we took him on a walk around the neighborhood, went to Wudaokou to check out Chinese schools […]

I’ve spent much of this year on the road, and one of my favorite parts of the day has been waking up in the morning and typing www.pandora.com into my browser window (I know, I should make a bookmark, but with auto-complete I usually end up just typing “pa”). Pandora is an internet radio service […]

I have no idea why I’m still stuck on bathrooms, but… If I were to teach a course on male bathroom design, the first principle I would teach would be: If you are going to build a bathroom without a door, the urinal should not be visible to people standing outside.

I was reminded of one of my favorite bathroom naming conventions in China today when I went to relieve myself today. The men’s room was named “The Pavilion of Watching the Waterfall” (观瀑亭), and the women’s room was called “The Room of Listening to the Rain” (听雨轩).