Well, as the titled says, i'm back in China visiting my fiance. I got here Sept 23. I spent my first few days in Shanghai staying with some friends from past trips. Most of my friends got jobs in shanghai, some in shenzhen, and some in beijing. Unfortunately, i won't be heading up to beijing this time.

After shanghai, we went to luoyang. that's where her family lives. the train ride was about 17 hours long, but we had a sleeper car, so it wasn't so bad. in the sleep car, there is like an aisle on one side with tables and folding chairs that come out from the wall. on the opposite side of that is cubbies withs bunk beds. there are 2 sets of 3 stacked beds in each cubbie. it was fun.

i met her parents and 3 of her sisters in luoyang. her oldest sister lives in the city. her older sister lives about 2 hours away and is married. her youngest still lives at home with her parents. So i stayed with them for almost a week. they live out in a rural property with a tiny bit of farmland. there's nothing quite like living with the natives. i really enjoyed it. i got to separate corn from the cob, pick cotton, plant stuff, and more. her father taught me how to drive their motor scooter. so selina and i used it to go to town. it's about 30 minutes drive from their house.

Thankfully her family likes me. they aren't especially happy that i'm american, of course, but at least her father accepts us. I really like them too. i'll miss my new little sister. hehe.

We left luoyang to go to shenzhen. the week-long, nation-wide holiday was up and she needed to get back to work. after a 45 minute taxi ride, a 24 train ride, and a 1 hour fast train ride, we finally arrived and took a short bus to the hotel. my apartment wasn't ready until the next day, which was another 45 min bus ride away. did i mention china is huge?

I've been able to see a few more of my friends here which is really cool, and selina's younger sister lives here. i get to see selina after her work every day. we walk around town, have dinner and usually watch a little tv or a movie. everything is going well. we are starting our paperwork now. my attorney tells me it will take 8-12 months to get the visa for her. we'll live in the states for about a year, then who knows. maybe we'll be back here

Well, my 360 got back form XBox support last week. FINALLY! I was pretty happy. While they had it, they replaced the fan and disc drive. The fan used to wake the dead, so that was definitely a welcome addition. I'm not sure why they replaced my drive though. Every once in 20 times, it didn't open right away, maybe that's it.

Well, I went out and bought GTA4 and Dark Sector to brush up on some games, but after about 3 days the drive stopped reading. it's really loud and won't read games or dvd's. So, I called Micro support again. They're sending me another box. Maybe some day this year i'll be able to play my xbox again.

I was once a proud owner of a fully functional Xbox 360. i loved it. I hated it. Mostly I condemned it for being irritating on minor issues, but it kept giving me it's love with great moments watching tv downloads and playing some good Live Arcade games. Overall, I'd say the box gave out more love than i put back into it. And maybe that's why....maybe that's why it had to end like this. This once proud 360 owner has now been bent over Microsoft's knee and "humbled". Only now do i appreciate using custom soundtracks, mostly decent arcade games, a convient download service for videos and demos and content, and 120GB of space to do as i please. Humility thy name is "red ring of death"....and i hate you.

Why wasn't i warned? It's pretty bad.

And I can only get $20 trade in credit. I can understand that. It's a piece of crap game with low resale.

day3 with rock band. about 10 hours of play time.

my 3 cousins and i played it. i switched off singing with one of my cousins, and the two others played bass and guitar. the guy playing on guitar used the explorer (with cord) while the bassist used the les paul (cordless). the les paul had about .5 sec delay. we tried every calibration preset. i finally got my internet back up today and downloaded the patch. now the lag is much more bearable, but it's still noticeable. sometimes the game won't even register some notes. especially if i went from a 2 note cord to a single note. it happens to all of us, really weird.

i hate the multiplayer world tour. you have to keep playing the same songs over and over and over and over again. my voice was to starting to fail by the time i had only played about 8 different songs - but that was in about 4 hours play time. ya it's that repetitive.

i played some single player for a few hours today. the tour is a lot better. it's the normal guitar hero style. the slight lag is irritating, but at least it isn't game breaking for me anymore. the guitar is much easier than guitar hero, so don't expect to be thoroughly challenged with it. that was a little disappointing, but i suspected they might tone it down to make it more accessible as a party game, so it wasn't necessarily a surprise.

i only like a few songs, but that's ok. i bought it to have fun with friends. i knew a lot of the songs sucked before i bought it. i just hope better songs come out soon and maybe a patch that fixes the game so we can have some fun. if they can roll out some better updates, my friends may decide to play again. as of now, the band is dead. they all said it sucks.

good things! the character customization is cool and i like the way they handle energy better (star power). if you are using energy, you can still pick it up while playing and it adds it to your pool. that's pretty much all my good notes for now.

Sorry I haven't kept in touch with everyone. Here's an update on anything worth noting in the past year:

My brother had a baby! ya i'm pretty happy. I'm finally an uncle. After about a week, he wasn't even ugly; kinda cute actually. I got to drive up to colorado to visit them for a week. He's really sweet. His name is Jordan.

Well, I went back to china this summer. This time i wasn't so much motivated by the teaching aspect though (but I still enjoyed that!). This trip I was more focused on seeing my girlfriend for the first time in a year. So, great news for me! I proposed to her the night before I left. I'll presume, your patting me on the back right now. thanks! She's planning a trip to come see me during her winter break in january. Then I'll visit next summer to meet her parents and hang out with her. ya ya. I hear your questions. Yes she's is chinese. yes she's extremely cute. hehe