I love the friendliness and quietness of South Dakota! We were getting some new vinyl for Grandma’s Creta’s bathroom which is being remodeled, when I noticed this sign.
The hardware store is big, like many other places. We were the only customers in there the whole time. Just give a little shout and the friendly men will help you with whatever you need to find.
Lots and lots of home-building/remodeling materials. It makes me excited to build a house when we get back to the US.
Last night, Jon and I were driving his dad’s big pickup truck down the empty highway underneath a sky full of stars, listening to country music.
I couldn’t help but think of what we might have been doing in Shanghai. We’d be squished in the back of a taxi, veering around hundreds of other taxis underneath the city lights and skyscrapers, listening to the blaring of horns and some loud Chinese yabbering on the radio.
I’m pretty sure that not many people have “homes” both in a city of 22 million and outside of a town of 200. Each of our homes has upsides and downsides.
When I was home, mom’s friend Jenny took me up in her airplane (and even let me fly!) Here are a couple of photos from the flight. More to come tomorrow!
This is probably my last post from South Dakota photos for a while! (Until October, anyway.)
When I was home, Jason and dad spent a couple days ultrasounding cattle. Not to check if they were pregnant, but to determine their back fat and marbling and the date they would be ready to sell.
Everytime I go home we have some fancy new-fangled thing.
This new tractor has auto-steering. It has a computer and GPS in it. Dad needed to turn the tractor at the end of the row, get it about where he was supposed to start planting the next row, and the auto-steer took over. It drove the tractor in a straight line until Dad took over to turn around.
This computer/GPS also keeps track of things like what variety of corn was planted, what time, which field it is, etc. At harvest time, the computer is put in the combine, where it records moisture, bushels per acre of yield, etc. Dad and Jason can now keep incredibily detailed track of everything about a field.
This is the cake I made dad for his 60th birthday. It’s a retro-colored cake.
(Really, the frosting was supposed to be white, but mom didn’t have any white shortening. So it turned out yellow. I decided to tint it slightly blue, but the blue combined with the yellow to make green. So I kept adding blue until it wasn’t green. Not exactly what I had in mind!)
Here are some more photos from my trip home – one night we went to look at the cows and their new calves with Shannon and Chloe. Chloe kept saying “Hi Baby Cows!” in a super cute 3-year-old voice.
The town, Vilas, is a few minutes west of Howard. Yes, that is a population sign, and yes, it does say 19.
When people in China say “I’m from a small city, only 2 million people” we can’t quite comprehend what is small about that. I think our whole state has a population of 800,000, with a population density of 1 person per 1.7 square kilometers.
I gave a speech at the District 78 Toastmasters Convention while I was at home. Here is a link to it. http://www.vimeo.com/4367664
China has blocked Blogger, which I use to publish my blog. Posting will be slim for a few weeks. I can post via email, but then I can’t edit it. Everyone seems to think the block will be lifted after the anniversary of a certain incident in Beijing involving a certain square.
I don’t think photos will come through either. If there is no photo with this post, I can’t post photos and probably won’t post until the block is lifted, unless I just host the images on my own server… Anyway, hopefully this test post works!
On January 16th, the skyscreen in Suzhou opened. It’s not a Daktronics display, but Keyframe did a bunch of content for it. Here is our favorite piece.
I wasn’t so impressed with the Dak Shack – beds like plywood and no hot water! Adam lives a couple blocks away so we showered there. Hot water is a luxury you take for granted. Also, none of the apartments here have heat. It’s only about 60 degrees F but it’s damp, so it feels pretty chilly.
A while back, the SD Cattlemen’s Association was invited to a new restaurant in Mitchell, SD called Whiskey Creek Grill to “brand” their bar. That’s right, everyone brought in their branding iron and left their mark on the bar.
The “John Reisch” brand. It’s made of a lazy R and rocking J. (correct me if I am wrong, mom!)
After we get the crops in, everyone who helped gets invited to a Harvest Party. We had this year’s party at Whiskey Creek.
Tim explains how he made his wedding ring out of a quarter. (yes, made, as in hammered a lot to get it in the perfect shape.) He made his wife’s out of a nickel from her birth year!
Deadwood was holding their annual Oktoberfest celebration that weekend. It included Wiener Dog races!
First there was a costume contest:
Then the race! There were several heats. Most of the dogs didn’t care too much about being the first to the other end – they were more interested in each other.
This guy won! He’d been in a few competitions before. His owner’s secret was to have a T-bone in his pocket, let him smell it right before the race, and hold it so the dog would race to the bone. It worked!
Before we moved to China, we went to Deadwood with Jon’s parents, brother and sister-in-law. We cashed in some hotel points for 3 king suites. We decided to do this again. Typically, I hate to gamble. I can’t even put in a whole roll of nickels before I get tired of throwing the money away. This time, I got lucky though!!
I’d put in just a few nickels when I hit it big! (OK, so it was about $40. But that’s a lot when you are betting 5 cents!) So, I cashed out just to hear the hundreds of nickels clinking out of the machine. The sound of winning!
This made me a bit braver to put in some more money. I still liked cashing out the best though. Jon also made some money playing black jack. Seriously, we came out over $100 ahead on gambling. That never happens. We decide how much money we are going to allow ourselves and when it’s gone, that’s the amount we traded for an evening of entertainment.
Whenever we go home, we buy a few dollars worth of scratch off lottery tickets. It helps pass the 6 hours it takes to drive from Jon’s parents house to my parent’s house. This time, we bought 6 tickets and 4 of those were winners! Most of them just covered the cost of the ticket, so nothing special. We really liked the design of the Crazy Cat tickets though – it reminded us of the paw-waving cat that you see in about every shop in China.
I’ve always loved getting mail. Today I got a package with a elephant stamp from Thailand. Something about the writing, elephant and baht made it seem quite exotic to me (hence worthy of a photo). Thanks Esther!
On our farm, the mailbox was located on the gravel road at the end of the driveway, which is typical in the midwest. I heard a story once that my cousin John had a girl from California visiting the farm. Apparently she had never been in such a desolate area (said sarcastically by me) because she said to John “You really get mail out here?”
To which he solemnly replied, “Actually, it’s just for looks. The Pony Express does come by once a week though.”
This is a display at the Sands Casino that is being replaced by a Daktronics HD 16 mm LED display. Right now they are removing the old one.
Bamboo scaffolding is used in all of the construction projects. Bamboo is extremely strong, but it is pretty unnerving to walk on it for the first few minutes because it gives. I didn’t have the best shoes on to be climbing the ladders with uneven steps, so I just went up a little bit. I understand now why all of the construction workers wear crocs or canvas shoes – they would grab the ladder better than the hard-soled steel toed boots I think they wear in the US.
Carefully lowering the old display piece by piece.
On Friday, I was going to work as usual when my boss convinced me I should take the day off and go to Suzhou with Esther. (He was right! Thanks Dan.) We showed her around before going to the train station. She really liked the LED displays as a background – I have to agree, it looks pretty cool.
A few weeks ago, we had 3 girls visit from the US. They were student reporters covering the Olympics. Quinn was from Brookings, so they ended up visiting Daktronics Shanghai for a morning. She is writing articles for the Brookings Register – here is the one that she mentioned us in.
Daktronics has a few displays at the new, famous CCTV building. I went to Beijing to give them software training. It would have been cool to be allowed on site, but the control room behind the display was the closest I got.
The curved HD display is on the left (turned off.)
I went up to Beijing to help with the data part of the displays that are being installed now at the new Beijing Railway South Station. It was a huge construction site, and my “head-back-turn rate” dramatically increased. I don’t think many of the migrant worker men expected to see a foreign woman on the construction site.
The Chinese version of the Keyframe logo animation, created by Hugo.
The main hallway – it’s HUGE!
Another one of the 11 displays, in the main hall.
Unfortunately, my laptop crashed! I was working the next day and it crashed. Then repeatedly blue-screened before even getting to the login screen. I was pretty freaked out that all of my data would be lost! That day I flew back to Shanghai and our wonderful IT guys Aaron and Michael had a new laptop waiting for me AND got all of my data off my old one. Whew.
Hugo, one of the Keyframe animators, got married on Sunday.
Jasmine and Hugo
One of the cool things about a Chinese wedding is that the bride will change dresses at least three times. So she gets to wear a few of her favorite dresses, not just one.
David, Jimmy, Ryan, Sofia and Yvonne taking a shot of baijiu.
Last month, a few of my co-workers from Shanghai and Macao went to South Dakota. Judd took a some people from the A/P region to the lake and Andy Tai (from our Macao office) shared these photos with us. Seeing these actually made me homesick for the first time since moving to China. Thanks for letting me put these photos up, Andy!
Beautiful blue sky, blue water… this is what SD looks like at the lake in summer!
Typical SD farm
Andy (PM in Macao), Fred (head of Shanghai repair center), and Gina (process engineer)
The hardware store is big, like many other places. We were the only customers in there the whole time. Just give a little shout and the friendly men will help you with whatever you need to find.
Lots and lots of home-building/remodeling materials. It makes me excited to build a house when we get back to the US.
