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So a friend and local business owner decided to start a charity using mustaches as the vehicle. The goal was to get guys to grow mustaches and collect donations during the month of April to raise money for a local cancer organization. www.marchstache.com

I was able to raise $2100NT, but another guy named ‘Patty’ was able to raise about $45,000NT! Amazing. It was lots of fun to see everyone with a mustache, but it was not fun to see ME with a mustache. Ewwww. For the final party, we had a big contest where everyone voted, and (unfortunately) I was voted “Creepiest Mustache.” Thanks guys!

Oh, well, it was fun and I got a free dinner at a taco stand. Check out the (not-quite-so) daily photos of my sad attempt to grow facial hair!

FREEDOM!

I have a few better pictures on the camera, I’ll try to post them later.

The first post in a long time. Sorry.

Tiffany and I are doing great at our new jobs. There is much less stress for us in terms of holiday decorating and the (very unreasonable) expectations that went along with it. We actually enjoyed Halloween this year.

Yesterday was the last day for bowling season. Our team finished fourth, which wasn’t bad at all. My teamate Daniel Russel got the golden pin (for the highest one-game score) with a 244! Just three pins short of our league record; 247.

Now I’m just getting nerdy, but I am excited about the next season. I recently got a 14.7 lbs. ball. I thought it would feel too heavy, but it’s been going ok. Lots of work to do if I want to throw a good hook.

Tiff is still learning Chinese and practicing all of her languages. There’s a nice pub around the corner from us where all the international business people go, so she still gets to practice her french and german.

Hope everyone is doing well. Maybe we’ll try to post some Christmas pictures (but don’t count on it).

Daniel and Tiffany

That’s right. I had an accident. I was going to post about it awhile ago, but the pain and fruit-truck-betrayal had me feeling pretty low. Didn’t really want to talk about it.

It was a fruit truck. He drove away.

My skin has grown back about 99 percent and I can walk with no pain. Luckily I have a doctor friend who, after hearing about the accident, showed up with DuoDerm to patch me up. There’s virtually no scars. Pretty cool stuff.

My knee and ankle are fine, but there was a while where walking was very painful. My helmet is OK too! But that is because my shoulder and elbow took the initial hit and my helmet really didn’t hit anything. My motorcycle is OK too. It took very little damage.

So I’m recovering. I can walk, and I think I can start jogging without my foot or knee hurting. I can bowl too, but I have to take it easy. My shoulder is the biggest thing right now. It’s been a month now, but my shoulder is still about 70%. My shoulder still can’t take the weight of my arm higher than the shoulder. Thankfully I have a good therapist who electrocutes my arm every few days and then does ultrasound on it. Maybe one more month and I will be climbing again!

On a lighter note, Tiffany enrolled us in Chinese courses. Loads of fun…

Hope to hear from you all! Hope all is well back in the western world.

Tiff and I celebrated our third year of marriage just a week ago. We actually celebrated it on Saturday so we could stay up later without worrying about work. We were very proud of ourselves because this is the first year that we remembered that it was our anniversary. The last two years usually resulted in one of us pointing it out a couple days afterwards.

Tiff and I are both holiday leaders at our schools, so life is in full swing again. We were having such a good month, too. Now we have to focus on delegating and decorating for Christmas celebrations and shows. Sorry to everyone, but we’re not making it out of Taiwan for Christmas. Maybe we’ll visit Taipei, go to the mountains to play in the snow, or even learn how to surf. We haven’t decided.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting impatiently for our next blog post. I’ve been getting tons and tons of hate mail from people who are upset that we haven’t written anything in over a month. I didn’t realize we were so popular!

Ok, so there weren’t really that many emails. And they weren’t hateful. Actually it was probably only one or two.
To be honest, I sent it to myself.
Actually, I saved it as a draft before I deleted it.

I lie.

Anyways: We are now in our new place. We have working appliances, work is closer, and the walls aren’t growing kamikaze-trained spores of mould who would have taken over the inner lining of my lungs, had we not moved. The new place is nice, and like I say, it is new (in the proper meaning of the word). We are the first inhabitants (if you don’t count the child-sized cockroach that we found the first night). Thank God Tiffany knew to stab at the mandibles or I would be missing 20 to 30 kg of my body.

Life goes on. We are at Halloween time and I am happy to report that it is going much much better this year. My health is always becoming more active in my life and many problems have evaporated without me having to resort to alcoholism, or even worse; self-help books. I’ve also switched toothpaste.

My in-home theater is running quite smoothly. As soon as Tiff releases more funds, I might even have surround sound and maybe eventually a couch. I’m really pushing for the surround sound.

To be honest, though, the last few months have been absolutely exhausting. Work sorta blurred into sleep and blurred into work again. Friends said goodbye, we were preoccupied with finding an apartment, and coffee seemed to lose it’s kind buzz. It’s times like these that virtues and vices tip the scales in awkward patterns that make you feel like the stupid kid at recess who thought it would be funny to stand in the middle of the see-saw. We all know that the fat kid is just waiting for you to lose concentration before he jumps off suddenly. And that leaves scars.

Luckily health care is cheap and available here.

Love you all. Please send us emails. I keep getting crap about lower mortgage rates and it would be great to hear from you!

Daniel and Tiff

Hello everyone. Just a quick note to let you all know that we’re moving so if you’re thinking about sending us something, you should wait. As soon as we know where we will live next, we will send you the new address.

Also, our friends and climbing partners Anthony and  Christal left today to go back home to Canada. We wish them tons of luck and want them to know we’ll miss them tons. Anthony and I undertook a huge project to develop a lot of climbing projects here in southern Taiwan. We’ve shared a lot of interesting experiences and close calls. Friends like that are hard to come by.

Daniel is starting a beginner class. Up until now, he has had mostly higher level students so this will be an interesting challenge for him.

That’s about it. We’ll try to put up pictures from our vacation soon, but since we’re moving…

We’re back from our climbing trip. After 50km (that’s about 30miles) of hiking, we achieved our goal of climbing Jade Mountain (Yushan) and coming back alive. The trails were gorgeous, when they weren’t washed out by landslides, and we did exceptionally well at not falling off the trail to our painful deaths. Now we just have to survive Kaohsiung traffic!

With vacation on the way we are trying to plan out what we will do to pass the time. We have already decided we will be staying in Taiwan to try to push forward on our project.

We are currently developing a number of places here in Kaohsiung to make them fun and safe for climbing. We went very slow at first so that we didn’t feel pressure and so we don’t make mistakes. Now things are going much better. We tend to get things done quicker, which is now a requirement because of the extremely hot and humid weather and our hike is about 30-40 minutes up the mountain plus the same to get down.

So, what to do when we’re not cleaning cliffs? We’re going to climb Yushan, the tallest mountain in south east Asia. It will be a nice three day trip. One day into the park, one day up the mountain, one day down the mountain and out of the park.

Because the main trail is usually overcrowded with tourists, and the main trail is steps carved into the stones (and probably a few nice boardwalks and stairs), we’re taking the back way in. Much steeper, much more rugged, and we probably won’t see a single person along the way (hopefully).

Wish us luck!

So Tiff and I, after a few years of dreaming, picked up a nice projector. Not too expensive, but the best part was that it came with a very cool floor screen. It just sits on the floor, you pull it up and it stays there. No fumbling or anything. Very cool. If you’re curious it’s an Epson emp-s4 LCD projector.

Along with that, I also picked up a wireless keyboard and mouse so I can  use the projector with my computer from the living room. My computer is still sitting in the office, but with the press of a button (or two) I can sit in the living room in front of my new giant “monitor” and check email, watch videos, listen to music, update facebook, and whatever else comes to mind.

This ushers in a whole new era of couch potato.

Right now I’m painting the wall with primer because I’m actually going to paint a screen onto the wall. The picture will be much better and the room will look more pleasing without a big awkward screen. I’ll use the screen for video games or something. I found that there are special paints for this sort of thing, but I’m just going with a nice matte gray. That’s right, I’ve read that gray is better for this because it contributes more to the contrast. I’m using matte so that it doesn’t reflect light back into my eyes.

We’ll try to get some pictures when the whole project is finished. We still have a lot to do before it’s a true home theater.

Yep, I’m sick again. Usually seems to happen every 2 to 3 weeks. The timing is good this time because I don’t work Tuesdays. So I’m just sitting at home drinking warm tea and watching all the torrential rains sweep in from the coast. I’m not exactly sure, but I think I’ve been sick for the same number of days that I’ve been healthy. Let’s hope this coming year isn’t so bad.