Happy new year!

We're back in Chengdu now, enjoying the last few days of vacation. It's cold, but it's good to be back. More pictures from Taiwan will come soon.

We came home to our orphaned puppy - Colby has grown a little and has been behaving better! Here he is in his new favorite place - on the futon, lounging on our electric blanket. He loves to curl up and soak in the heat. So in many ways, we are no different than him!

I wanted to share one exciting technological feat since we have been back - our first ever on-line Skype Catan game! Sharon (my sister) recently got both Catan and a webcam, and wanted to try and play with us. We set up mirror boards in Michigan and China, and used Skype to communicate back and forth. We took turns, traded cards, built roads and settlements without any need to make adjustments to the gameplay. It turned out to be much easier and faster than we predicted! It was a lot of fun. Here's what the setup looked like on our end:

The laptop webcam took a picture of our board, which was on the table. The TV in the background projected the webcam image of what was going on in Michigan. Pretty nifty, eh?


Even the sound quality was better than normal, which helped. The voice in the background of the video is actually Matt, my brother-in-law, being piped into our speakers via Skype.



So hopefully we'll do it again!

-alan