I've been swamped for the past couple of days...literally. My water service sprang a leak last Friday and left my front yard a soggy mess. Crews from the city water department spent all day Saturday digging up my road frontage with a backhoe and left a huge, sodden pit of mud lined with uprooted shrubs. They eventually fixed it, but not before finding a second leak on the line running under the road to my neighbor's house. Apparently, the city decided to get rid of some closeout stock when they originally installed the line back in the 1960s, because the crew chief told me he thought they stopped using piping like that about 20 years earlier. Since the leak was in the city line, they're on the hook to clean up the mess they made, but I'm not exactly sure when that's going to be.

I've also been attending a class at work. I'm supposed to become a backup disk instructor, so I've been sitting in on a colleague's class.

In addition to all that, I'm still sorting out all the details for my trip to China next week, so I was pretty happy to find the Oriental Historical Architecture site which has an excellent section on Beijing and its environs. Once I finally figured out where my hotel is, I could then take a look at some of the more notable sites near the Haidain District like the Summer Palace and the Drum and Bell Towers. I also had fun looking up some of the places I've visited in Korea, Japan, and Singapore.