Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Chapter 18: Being a Rather Large Nutshell of the Author's Busyness

So much has happened since I last posted! None of it violently thrilling (or even peacefully thrilling), but busyness has been my theme this week. In thought and in deed.

At the end of last week I was busy with the IT conference and spending all day (three days in a row) helping students log in to websites, mail, skydrive clouds, and all other manner of e-problems. Friday afternoon was a relief.

Sort of. As soon as I got home, we had a British friend come over. We went to a noodle joint run by Chinese Muslims. Basically the best noodles for the fairest price in Qingdao. If you could have fajita lamb with onions and peppers and noodles, you'll have a good idea of what it tastes like. So we got to know Joel, our British friend, and it was great.

Immediately after that, we had two guys come to shoot a promotional video for our school system. These guys are great and they were a lot of fun to hang out with, but they stayed with us and it was a lot more work than I had been expecting. But our apartment and we will be in the promo video now for people looking to join the company. So that's pretty fun! (Completely random side note: We have a water tower with potable water and every once in awhile it will have a sporadic release of an air bubble even if no one has been near it for hours. Such a thing just happened, and in my empty home it made me jump a bit too high. Ridiculous.)

Monday I started Chinese classes. I'm really excited about this, and my teacher is very good. We got through 6 lessons in one session, which was twice as many as he was expecting! So I am going to start learning the Chinese characters as well as the spoken language. Exciting!

Last night we (for future reference, "we" will usually refer to Zack, my roommate, and me) had an invitation to dinner with a great family at the school. The dad is a few years older than me and he and I are quite similar in many ways, so it was fun to be there, even though I was pretty wiped out at this point. But his son is 5 and reminds me so forcefully of my own nephew that I couldn't help but be amazed at the similarities.

And on top of all this "normal" life craziness, I've been trying to get caught up with my teaching.

Overwhelmed. But getting better each day. And now for a night in with nothing to do but a bit of work and a bit more relaxation.

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