Our first blog post of 2012! (And our first one, in like, a month, right?) To keep it relatively simple, here’s a generic 2011 recap survey:
1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Matt – moved outside of the western suburbs of Chicago
Angel – taught English as a legit teacher
2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
Matt – Nope and nope. I don’t even remember them!
Angel – What he said.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Matt – What? I don’t think so. Um…
Angel – Yes! Two dear friends from our home church both had their first babies not too long ago. I’m so excited for them!
4. Did anyone close to you die?
Matt – Jen
Angel – Yes, 2011 was a sad year My aunt Jen passed away after a bone marrow transplant and a good friend from home passed away in a car accident. Both were so young. It’s still unbelievable to me.
5. What places did you visit?
Matt – Arizona, LaPorte, Hong Kong, Beijing, Guangzhou
Angel – What he said
6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Matt – Amazing Mandarin skills
Angel – What he said
7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Matt – I’m not very good with dates, so this one is proving to be problematic.
Angel – I’m also not good with dates, but Jen passed away Memorial Day weekend, and I will always remember that weekend as a terrible weekend, even if I don’t remember the dates. Matt and I were camping that weekend, and it literally rained the whole time, except for when were almost caught in a tornado at the campground while sitting in my car.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Matt – Feeling good about finishing the semester
Angel – The first time I took the bus by myself in Tianjin
9. What was your biggest failure?
Matt – Not being able to help my dad sell his business before I left
Angel – Every time I went to the printer’s office at our school
10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Matt – Nothing serious, but the whole trip up to Tianjin, I felt like I was going to die from food poisoning.
Angel – Just a bad cold during the week of my birthday
11. What was the best thing you bought?
Matt – Macbook
Angel – Projector
12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Matt – My dad for selling his practice
Angel – My awesome husband for being amazing every day
13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Matt – In the news in general, Anthony Weiner.
Angel – Call me a cultural snob/elitist, but Chinese people who are constantly spitting everywhere. I just can’t get used to that. I still flinch every time.
14. Where did most of your money go?
Matt – Health insurance
Angel – Health insurance
15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Matt – Food
Angel – Having a Western bathtub
16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
Matt – “You and I” by Ingrid Michaelson
Angel – a song I wrote earlier in the year after being laid off about things being difficult and depressing, but not giving up hope. It also came to my mind a lot during the week of Jen’s funeral.
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder?
Matt – Happier
Angel – Happier
b) thinner or fatter?
Matt – Thinner
Angel – I don’t know, I haven’t weighed myself since we got to China, but my pants still fit well, so hopefully thinner or the same
c) richer or poorer?
Matt – Poorer
Angel – Poorer, but with fewer expenses
18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Matt – Trust that everything would be okay in the end
Angel – Organizing time with my students
19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Matt – Worrying
Angel – Assignments for my students
20. How did you spend Christmas in 2011?
Matt – Went to church and rode around Tianjin with Ariel
Angel – Ate breakfast at McDonald’s with Matthew, went to the international fellowship, hung out with Ariel
21. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Matt – I fall in love every day with the same woman
Angel – Nope, just stayed in love
22. What was your favorite TV program?
Matt – Modern Family
Angel – Dollhouse
23. What did you do for your birthday in 2011?
Matt – Went out for Indian food with my whole family
Angel – I was super sick, but Matthew still took me out to Coldstone and to Walmart
24. What was the best book you read?
Matt – Oryx and Crake
Angel – this free Nook book called Mary Magdalene – A Woman Who Loved. I also loved The Hunger Games
25. What did you want and get?
Matt – A job in China
Angel – Lots of things, a Kinect a projector, to hang out with David in Chicago
26. What did you want and not get?
Matt – To hang out with my family for Christmas
Angel – An office chair and a memory foam pad. And a Chinese massage. (Maybe next week?)
27. What was your favorite film of this year?
Matt – Green Hornet
Angel – X Men
28. Did you make some new friends this year?
Matt – Yes
Angel – Yes
29.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Matt – If I was already fluent in Chinese
Angel – Knowing the expectations of our school about teaching and grading, etc.
30. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
Matt – Old Chinese Man
Angel – Boring teacher?
31. What kept you sane?
Matt – My wife. That means you. Though sometimes you did make me a little insane. You can’t have the honey without the macademias.
Angel – Matthew. Jesus.
32. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Matt – Fancy? What is this, England? That Kim Jong-un guy is pretty fancy.
Angel – I don’t know, I guess Kiefer Sutherland because 24 got me through many hours of boring essay grading.
33. What political issue stirred you the most?
Matt – Occupy Wall Street
Angel – Environmental Protection and Food Safety
34. Who did you miss?
Matt – My family
Angel – I probably missed our dog the most since we lived with her every day.
35. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
Matt – Even if someone says the water is okay, if you suspect it’s bad, don’t drink it.
Angel – Never trust a Chinese person giving you directions. No matter how confident they sound.
Recently, we’ve decided to start a business doing online marketing and web design. Or rather this business decided to start itself. Basically, every time people found out that we do (or for me, did) web design and email design at our jobs, if they were in need of any design work themselves, they asked us if we could help them out.
Since we’re the kinds of people who do the same to others (“Oh, you’re in med school? Look at my throat; does it look funny to you?”), we don’t mind when people we know ask us to do web design for them.
But as more and more of these side projects kept cropping up, we figured maybe we should put a legitimate business name out there, so people who don’t already know us can hire us too.
And with that, the idea for AmLee Web Design was born. Initially, we thought about some other name options, including Lee Web Design Solutions. But we thought AmLee was more unique and clever, so we went with that.
We bought our domain name so that we could make an amleewebdesign.com site, but then we realized that to run a business in Illinois, you can’t name the business anything other than your full legal name unless you officially register the business name with your county clerk.
So today we went to the county clerk’s office and filed an application to name our business AmLee Web Design. It cost $5. We thought that was a pretty reasonable start-up fee.
After filing our application, the lady at the clerk’s office told us we would have to go to a local newspaper and get them to run our business name in their legal section for three weeks before our business name would become fully official.
She neglected to mention that it costs $99.12 to have the newspaper run your business name in their legal section for three weeks. *Sigh*
Oh well, we’re pretty sure that cost can be a tax write-off at least.
But it did get me thinking…$99.12 is a lot of money to have a tiny hometown newspaper run three lines of fine print in a legal section no one reads. But in a faltering industry, you have to get your money any way you can.
A few weeks ago, this little boy knocked on our door. He was selling newspaper subscriptions to this same local newspaper for $10. He said that the money would go to help him get a scholarship for his school.
He was cute and looked sincere. He seemed to have official paperwork with him. So I said I would give him $10, but I didn’t want to get a newspaper subscription. I just wanted to give him $10 toward his scholarship without the newspaper taking a cut. I didn’t have any cash, so I wrote him a check. When I asked if I could write the check directly to him or to his school, he said, “No, you still have to write it to the Naperville Sun.”
Hmm. Seemed fishy, but okay. He promised me he wouldn’t sign me up for a subscription.
A week later, we started receiving newspapers on our door step. I barely glanced at each newspaper before throwing it in our recycling bin. That was precisely why I didn’t want a subscription. I already have an AP News app on my phone that I don’t have to throw out when I’m finished reading. I just press a button and it refreshes the next day.
As a literature lover and someone who’s just old enough to remember the days before we had the internet, I understand that old-fashioned love of printed material. I still love the smell of old library books.
But now that we have so many useful tools at our fingertips that save time, money, and paper, I sometimes feel that sticking to our old-fashioned, impractical ways can be detrimental to our current growth as a society.
Photo by rklau (flickr.com)
If newspapers are struggling to survive, maybe they should learn how to do online news better. Maybe they should offer a cheap, online application for posting legal ads. That way I wouldn’t have to drive 20 minutes out of my way on gas that costs $4.09 a gallon to get them to print three lines of fine print that no one will read anyway.
What do you think? Do you still read newspapers the old-fashioned way? Do you think there will come a day when newspapers will be too outdated to survive at all?
I’m very pleased with how the worms are coming along. After the fruit fly scares, we’ve had no major problems with bugs, just lots of slow white mites.
A couple of weeks ago, I started noticing earwigs hanging out near the worm bin. While earwigs don’t fly (after researching I discovered they can fly, but they rarely do) and they don’t multiply as quickly as fruit flies and fungus gnats, I still didn’t want any problems with them. They kind of gross me out with those menacing pincers. (I know they can’t pinch humans, but still…gross.)
So finally I decided, enough is enough. I invested in a Worm Inn. Worm Inns are amazing contraptions, sold through Bentley Christie’s Red Worm Composting website. Bentley’s site has taught me basically everything I know about worm composting. So if these posts intrigue you and you’re thinking about starting a worm farm yourself, definitely check his site out.
Anyway, I bought the Worm Inn (pictured below) and got it set up today. It is amazing. Very easy to set up, holds all of our worms, and takes up less space while looking more attractive than our old Rubbermaid tub with mosquito netting taped around it. Plus, the compost that comes out is supposed to be much better quality, not so soupy and mushy like the kind produced in the Rubbermaid tub.
As I transferred the worms, I saw tons of baby worms and worm cocoons, so they seem to be quite happy. If anything, they were probably hungry since I stopped feeding them so often to decrease the fruit fly threat. Matthew chopped up lots of food for them, and they should be quite content in their new home.
The old Rubbermaid worm bin. I taped mosquito netting around it to keep pests out.
The new Worm Inn, available at http://www.redwormcomposting.com. I had to get some PVC pipes cut at Ace Hardware to make the stand, but it was super cheap, like $5 or less. And VERY easy to put together, even for the technically challenged
The top view of the Worm Inn. The extra oxygen flowing through makes the compost better quality, but the mesh top also keeps the bugs out.
There are drawstrings included with the Worm Inn, but I made it a little more secure by tying some clothes line around. So far nothing is leaking and no worms have escaped.
The Worm Inn came with zip ties, but I thought clothes line knots would be more secure.
The empty Rubbermaid bin after I successfuly transferred all the worms to their new home. We had some interesting white mold growing in there that I'd never seen before. I think it came because of some moldy coconut remains that Matt's mom gave us. Hopefully the ventilation in the Worm Inn will stop it from spreading.
But we were inspired yesterday by our lovely friend, Steph Lee, to get back into a regular blogging schedule. Okay, so we’ve never had a regular blogging schedule on this blog to speak of, but we’re going to start. We’ll even write it down on our calendar.
We’re learning a lot of things about web design at work, so we’ll implement some cool new things here soon too.
May is turning out to be way busier than anticipated, but great to see long-lost friends like Steph, Chuck, Bob, Jacob, Jasko, Butz, and Kate!
Also great to catch up with friends who aren’t so long-lost, but who we still love hanging out with (Yay, Karen!)
Our worms are doing well, we think. There was a lot of undigested food in their bin, so we decided to leave them for about a month without even checking on them. So far none have tried to escape, so we think they’re pretty happy.
I don’t even remember if we’ve talked about our worms on here yet. If not, we started a worm composting bin a few months ago. Things were going pretty well until we had a massive infestation of gnats. At first, it was kind of annoying, but we thought we’d just live with it.
Then when it got to the point that these gnats were so overrunning the house that they would fly into our faces in every room, land on my cheek when I was putting on moisturizer, and land in a pan we were cooking in, we decided something needed to be done.
After lots of research and help from the Red Worm Composting site and other online forums, we started freezing all of our compost scraps (to prevent new eggs from coming in), putting fly tape on the top of our bins to kill some of the adults, and putting this natural bacterial larvacide in our bin that kills fungus gnat larva but not worms.
We had been leaving the worm bin outside so our apartment could be gnat free while we waited for the gnats to die. Two weeks later, there were still a lot of gnats in the bin and we were going out of town for the weekend to visit family for Easter. It was supposed to snow that weekend, so we couldn’t leave the worms outside while we were gone. We really didn’t feel like having a host of gnats living inside again, so I told Matt, “It’s do or die time. We have to empty out the whole bin and clean the gnats out, rinse off the worms in case there are any eggs on them, and start over with fresh, clean compost.” Kind of ironic to have clean compost. But that’s what we needed.
Also I had read about others with gnat infestations cleaning out their worm bins, including rinsing their worms off to get rid of any eggs, and their worms turned out fine. So it didn’t feel that weird to me. Just a lot of time and hassle.
It was pretty amazing. We saw baby worms, worm cocoons, and discovered that some of the worms kind of have personalities. Some are pretty crafty and good at finding hiding places. One of them reminded us of PS because it liked to burrow in a piece of corrugated cardboard and wouldn’t come out until we dismantled its hiding place.
So anyway, after hours of cleaning out the worm bin and washing off the worms, their new gnat-free home was set up.
We left for the weekend, came home, and found half of our worms shriveled up and dead on the kitchen floor. They had crawled out of the bin and died in a large circle around the bin. It was pretty tragic.
Turns out we had left their new home too dry, so they escaped looking for the promised land. Unfortunately, their promised land was nowhere to be found, so they just died.
We added some water and some more food and managed to save the rest of our worms who are still thriving today. Whew.
So now we’re paranoid about getting more gnats or flies in the bin after all that work and death. A few weeks ago we found some fruit flies and their pupae in the bin. Fortunately, I don’t think they were able to find enough food to survive (we now cover the compost/food section with a big layer of cardboard to make it more difficult for flies/gnats to breed…seems to be working well so far). We realized that in our paranoia about losing the rest of our worm population, we had overfed them and needed to leave them alone for awhile so they could catch up with the food we had given them. So that’s where we stand now. Happy, eating worms. Hopefully no flies/gnats.
Here are some videos:
A baby worm I found while rinsing off the worms.
Evil pupae! We discovered these a few weeks after cleaning out the worm bin…but pretty sure they the flies weren’t able to multiply. We only found a couple of them and haven’t seen any in several weeks.
My aunt Jen passed away after a bone marrow transplant and a good friend from home passed away in a car accident. Both were so young. It’s still unbelievable to me.
