"I'm Lovin' It!": McDonald's, Indexing, and Homesickness

Dave has been madly indexing his book for the past couple of days. This entails using a program that pulls up a phenomenally huge amount of subjects and their corresponding pages. Once that is done, Dave has to go through all the entries, letter by letter, and decide which to keep, how to organize the subjects, what to cross-reference, etc. It is long and dirty work. He's doing remarkably well for having had very little sleep the last couple of nights. The only breaks he's taking are for meals and ice skating (the latter being the reason I'm making two posts right now--I don't get any exercise, but I get to write a little).

Last night Jed dropped by while Dave was up working late. (Dave is using Vanetta's apartment while she's gone so he has a modicum of peace and quiet in which to work. Jed's apartment is just across from Vanetta's.) Anyway, Jed brought Dave a "pie" from McDonald's. I just had to take a picture of it when I saw it:

I don't know if you can see what kind of pie it is: "Red Bean Pie". Not your usual McDo fare. The bag sports the "Beijing 2008" Olympics logo that you see everywhere here. And of course, the bag also shows lots of athletes, all of whom I am sure eat at McDonald's whenever they can.

I would have thought that with only six weeks to go I wouldn't have to deal with homesickness anymore. And frankly, it hasn't reared its ugly head for a long time now--maybe a month? That has to be a record. But today it came back with a vengeance and who did it hit? Me! Crazy. So I did what any sane person would do on a gray, cold day a bazillion miles away from friends and family: I baked a huge pile of oatmeal cookies. It's not even so much that I want to eat them--I just wanted the house to smell good and I love seeing the kids get excited about having a cookie treat in the afternoon. For the record, I also gave half of the total batch to Jed who is leaving tonight with a friend on an overnight train ride to Beijing. Cookies on the train, yum!

We are leaving for Xi'an and Shanghai next Monday, January 21. We'll probably take our computer along, if only to have someplace to load our pictures when the camera fills up. I don't know if we'll find internet access, though, so we may be silent until the end of the month. If this ends up happening, be assured that we will have plenty of stories and photos to share with you when we get back.