Nauvoo

Really enjoyed our time last weekend at Nauvoo. Congrats to Pat and Amber!

Mid-autumn festival

I brought back from Malaysia some lanterns and moon cakes

We ended up celebrating an early mid-Autumn festival as the kids paraded around the yard with their candle-lit lanterns. Fun. One of the moon cakes had a solid duck egg yolk. The kids didn't notice until it was almost done. They were filled with lotus seed paste.

Calling all three year olds

Curious how your height stacks up to historical Joneses? Check this out, any 3-year olds in the audience! Here is how it stacks up in inches for all these people at age three:

Janet 35 inches
Courtney 36.25 inches
Dick 36.75 inches
Tyler 37.25 inches
Allison 38 inches
Bump 38.25 inches
Hal 39 inches
Dan 39.25 inches
Pat 39.75 inches

Interesting. We also have "close to three" measurements:

Sydney at 2 years, 10 months was 37.75 inches
Nathan at 2 years, 4 months was 35 inches

Compiled this from the 9th Street wall in Rochester, plus our family's official measuring stick.

Circus World Museum

Some pictures from Circus World Museum, near the Wisconsin Dells.

Hong Kong pictures

Here are some shots from Hong Kong - etaing lunch with our Hong Kong Abbott team, and a picture of the mascots at Olympic park. Got to attend church at an English-speaking branch in Hong Kong, which was an uplifting time.

Shanghai

I'm in Shanghai now, made it successfully on the trip and am a bit jet-lagged but otherwise OK. Trying to get around, but don't know a word of Chinese, which is interesting (I think I need George here- :))

A funny thing is that my travelling companion's name is Michal (pronounced Mee-How), he's our marketing researcher from Poland. His name apparently means "hello" in Chinese, so he's found it increasingly confusing to use his name here "Mee-how, I'm Mee-how" so we had reservations last night, and he used "Mike".

We took the Mag lev train from Pudong airport to Longyang road station. It was super fast - 430 km/hr. The weirdest part was passing another train going the opposite direction at that speed-- it seemed to take just a fraction of a second.

A lot of American restaurants here-- maybe because we are staying downtown at a touristy area. McDonald's and Burger King are both within walking distance, and we stopped at ColdStone Creamery for ice cream last night.

Museum of Science and Industry

Had a good time with today's activities - did the Museum of Science and Industry, American Girl Store, and John Hancock building observatory. We did all the travel by train and bus, which worked out pretty well and saved some gas.