Archive for the ‘Flora & Fauna’ Category
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Addie’s Ashes – cremating our dog in China
It’s been a handful of days now, and both Maggie and I are coming to terms with Addie’s death. I still expect her to be there, wagging her tail, when we open the front door; and I still look for her underfoot when I get up from the sofa. But time is a cool leveler, and has given me a glimpse that the pain we initially felt will eventually fade and be replaced by our numerous fond memories of her.
One step in that process is laying her to rest. You would think that with everyone and their cousin having…
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Addie Update #2: The Youth in Asia Debate
A couple of days ago I drew up a calendar on a whiteboard Maggie uses to keep track of her yoga clients. The calendar shows the dates from December 23 (the day before we found out Addie was suffering from aflatoxicity) to January 4th (one day after the vet said she would be lucky to live until).
It’s been a week, and with three days to go, Addie’s still putting up a good fight. She’s looking a bit worse for wear though, and despite us doing our best to clean her, smells of a rather horrible combination of stomach…
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US-made Optima dog food in China may have killed my dog
In what’s poised to be the absolute worst Christmas ever, there is an excellent chance my dog – my awesome, beautiful, wonderful, fantastic dog – is going to die.
After posting the other day about the possibility of her having come into contact with aflatoxin contaminated Optima dog food, a visit to the vet yesterday confirmed it. Her liver is shutting down.
We had hoped that her fussy eating lately was just her usual finicky self. However, when the whites of her eyes yellowed yesterday and she peed in the house (something she never does) we called…
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Feeding your dog Optima in China? Stop.
The last two days we’ve been dealing with a bit of a scare. We got a call from our pet shop asking us if we’d seen the news. Optima – the decent-quality, American-made dog food we’ve always fed our pup – was issuing a major recall because contaminants had been found in it.
Apparently since the end of November about 30 dogs have died in the Yangtze Delta (Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, etc.) of liver complications – and they all ate Optima dog food.
According to the pet shop, the food was contaminated with “黄曲霉素”, or aflatoxin, an extremely toxic and…
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Karmatic Moment of the Week: Snake Rescue
I got an early phone call from my friend and neighbour Kevin today. It’s not odd that he called, he often calls, but it did seem weird it was only 9 a.m.
“Ryan, can you come outside for a minute, I need a hand.”
In slippers and pajamas I wander out into the apartment building’s entrance to see what’s going on and find Kevin carefully examining what looks to be a couple pieces of paper.
“I’ve got a snake,” Kevin says, too focused on the critter to see my surprise.
Turns out that he had innocently thrown a few stickers…
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Who stopped the rain?
Suzhou is green. Hell, it’s a garden city. And a great part about it, is it stays green all year round. It makes the city a nice place to look at no matter what time of year you come here.
The tradeoff is that it rains non-stop. We go from rainy season to typhoon season back to rainy season. It is a stark contrast to my days up in Dalian that, for all its brown-grassed winters, has a huge amount of sunshine.
Which makes this past week a bit of an anomaly. We’ve had almost seven days of straight sunshine.…
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Puppy Power in the PRC Part II
Well, it’s the end of day three with the puppy and I dare say there’s not a place she hasn’t marked with a little bit of puppy love.
The physics of a puppy astound me. I swear more comes out of her than goes in.
But for every ounce of patience she takes from me, she gains back points from the fact that she can be entertained for 10 minutes just by putting a towel over her head (she’s trying to navigate her way out as I type).
Just thought I’d post a photo that pretty much sums up my…
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Puppy Power in the PRC
It’s somewhat amazing how quickly a relatively calm and orderly life can be turned into a non-stop “no!” shouting, pee cleaning, slobber and hair covered existence.
We got a puppy!
Maggie and I have long talked about getting a dog, and in the end always had something looming that prevented us (mostly financial or geographical). However, when she got back from Dalian last week we began talking about it again, as I wanted to get her a dog for our anniversary (and cleverly name it “Paper”).
After running through the pros and cons a couple dozen times, and debating it…
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Suzhou’s Surging Wave Pavilion (沧浪亭)
To say Suzhou has a lot of gardens is an understatement somewhat akin to saying China’s got a lot of people.
It’s the fact that there are so many of them that I’ve only slowly crept out to visit them. Much like temples in China, Suzhou’s gardens do tend to blend together. Generally speaking, they all contain a bamboo garden, big rocks, a pond full of hungry koi, a UNESCO World Heritage site marker, and several busloads of daytrippers.
My apartment is a 10-15 minute walk from two such gardens, but living next to a UNESCO World Heritage site…
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More seasons than a spice rack
One of the toughest things for Maggie and I to get used to about living in Suzhou over living up in her home town in the north-east or mine in Canada is the weather.
We are both used to four distinct seasons running from a warming spring, a hot summer, a cooling fall and a freezing winter. I wrongly assumed that Suzhou had fewer seasons. Basically the weather goes from ‘chilled to the soul’ cold to ‘please somebody shoot me’ hot… with very little in between.
As we moved to Suzhou at the end of last summer, and it…
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Things that go “squeak” in the night
I was working late on the computer yesterday, and after being quite certain I’d dosed my eyes with a suitable level of radiation, I decided to turn in.
Maggie, having to be up bright and early (oddly, at the same time as myself – but she requires something stupid like 10 hours of sleep), had gone to bed earlier. So it was that as I exited my “office”, out of the air-conditioned comfort and into the dark sauna that is my living room, and I stepped on something soft and …well… squeaky.
Now, I quickly passed it off as just…
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Survivor: China – The Best Worst Idea Ever
I like Survivor.
There, I’ve said it. Please scroll down and immediately flog me in the comments. I don’t care. I’ve had this romantic notion of being trapped on a deserted island since I was a kid and saw Brook Shields’ (ahem) assets in The Blue Lagoon.
When the reality TV show debuted back when I was in college, I couldn’t get enough. Over the seven years since I’ve had highs and lows with the show, but still generally enjoy it (and am currently playing catchup with this season’s torrents).
But, when I read the news that Survivor…
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The First And Last Day of Spring
Alright, it’s been all of five minutes or something since I posted my last entry – but this deserves mention, especially taking into account how much I bitched about the cold.
Spring came the other day. It was great. All 24-hours of it.
After wearing a coat, hoodie and undershirt last weekend, despite being officially a few days into Spring, Monday brought with it more the weather one would expect from Winter’s follow-up.
The day after the mercury hit 27°C here in Suzhou, floated up to about 29° today.
With both Maggie and I being from climates where March…
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The Green Leap Forward
Apparently my little home-away-from-home province of Jiangsu is kickin’ ass in green goals met. Thanks to Jeremiah over at The Duck who led me to this China Dialogue article about Jiangsu province setting a shining example for possibly solutions to China’s massive environmental issues.
Jiangsu’s contribution to China’s gross domestic product (GDP) has consistently ranked among the country’s top three provinces. The province’s economic growth in 2006 was 14.9%, China’s highest. Last year, it was also one of only two provinces that met national targets on pollution reduction and energy efficiency.
In 2006, emissions of major pollutants in
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More than 1 out of 5 Canadians are idiots
I often touch on, but rarely dedicate entire posts to my country or its inhabitants… but this is just too… too… too I don’t know what to not comment on.
Almost 4 out of 5 Canadians believe in global warming: poll
Thursday, March 22, 2007 | 3:13 PM ET
CBC NewsA new poll suggests most Canadians believe climate change is a reality, but people in various regions hold widely different attitudes — with Albertans expressing the most skepticism.
The survey conducted by Angus Reid Strategies released Thursday found that almost four in five Canadians — 77 per cent
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Give the Gift of Love – Give Chicken
Anyone that’s been in China for more than six minutes has been hounded by a plethora of bowl weilding beggars looking for your chinky bits (and no, that’s not a racial slur).
Rumours abound about these unfortunate, often elderly or massively under-abled, people. I’ve heard tales that they are pimped out by the local triads, that they make heaps of money and it’s all a show.. and.. well.. ok, those are the two big ones.
However, compassion often gets the best of me and I usually end up dumping my bus fare in their dishes – sometimes adding a tad…
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Foreign People Zoo
Alright, so Chinese people want to stare at us laowai. It’s time we quit complaining and start cashing in. The “like a monkey in a zoo” thing is something I got chatting with a friend about once and he had the wonderful suggestion that I might just bank on. As I started to delve into it on a friend’s site, I figured why not elaborate on the idea a bit here.
Though China has a lot of poverty, they don’t corner the market on it. There are more than enough homeless and un-employable people out there in Western countries, and…
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