The Project is Almost Finished…

It took us a lot of weekends and evenings to translate the text from Chinese to English, and now the writing process of adding the English text into the Chinese books is taking even more time.  We had planned on having these done months ago, but they will make perfect gifts when we go back to Canada in three weeks.  I wish we could do more, but the time it takes for just one has been tremendous.  Maybe we will do more when we get back… or work on the next book.

I finished one of the books tonight, Eva is half done the second and I have to get the third finished up in the next week or so.  It’s a good thing we both have pretty neat handwriting, although Eva’s is nicer than mine… and she’s Taiwanese!

Anyone out there know the story…

The gifts of these books is still a secret, but I am just really excited about them and I know anyone out there who knows what these books are will see why I am so excited to have translated them with Eva and put our translations directly into the book.  Maybe we should open our own translation service…

Racking my brain for the missing books from my list.  I found a few clues here on Xanga, one on Facebook and two more on a site I posted books I had to trade with people.  I think I am still missing five books.  I wish Simon had a good enough  memory for what I traded to him over the last year and a half so I could remember the last.  I sent a message to Facebook about them ditching my information for their new set-up and I am sure I will receive a wonderful form letter from them explaining that ‘change is good’.  A site like that really should have sent out a message to all users of a possible loss of information on the change over.  But, I guess their feud with Google is more important.

I just remembered the Conrad book while I was writing this.  Down to four more.  Good thing I read an author more than once a lot of the time or I would never have remembered all of these.  This is going to drive me absolutely crazy until I figure it out!!!

I am so mad right now at Facebook.  In the general information section they had sections for you to put your favorite books, movies, TV shows and other useless information about yourself.  I started using that to keep track of the books I have read while I have been in Taiwan.  I know, to most people it’s not that important of a thing, but I usually keep the books I read in my collection, but since coming here I always trade them in so I don’t accumulate too much stuff.  The running total was from the day I arrived in Taiwan in November of 2006 to now… and now it’s gone!

They decided to change up the website so that instead of you being able to actually write about yourself or the things you like, they want links so that other people can ‘like’ it as well.  Well, good idea for people who want to be like others, bad idea when it erases what I think  is the only copy of that list I had.  I thought I had posted it on here at one time or another, but I can’t find it.  I found the list for 2009 until now (missing the last few books, but I know what they were), but I really love that list.  It’s like standing in front of my bookshelves I used to have back home and be able to just get lost for a few minutes in the memories of each story… now gone.

Sure, I remember a lot of the books I read, but I know the list for the first two years was about 50 novels and no matter how hard I try I am not going to remember all of them.  Even piecing it together from entries on here will only give me a small glimpse of what I read.  I already found a few I forgot without the list, but I know others will be gone from my memory.  Why do they have to make changes like this to information we want on our site.  I guess I’m dumb for putting it on Facebook and not here, the site I have paid for for LIFE.  Where is the LIKE button for Xanga and the DISLIKE button for Facebook.

I want my books back…