Moving Letters

Currently reading: The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder

Currently listening to: All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone by Explosions in the Sky

What have I accomplished in the last 6 hours? (Gotta love productive Friday nights)

• I baked a cake
• Rearranged the furniture in my bedroom
• Hung up things around the apt.
• Got things together for our upcoming community garage sale
• Organized my pictures
• Picked which pictures to print and get framed
• Decorated a bit
• Cleaned out the frig
• Did a few dishes
• Mounted a reading light next to my bed and a bulletin board on my desk

So my 8th graders are working on a huge project now and it will finally be over on Wednesday when they give their oral presentations to their peers. Next Friday is the end of the 1st quarter--how is it possible that we're 1/4 of the way finished with the school year already? Life at school has its growing stress. Coming up is Spirit Week ending with International Day, along with Student-Led Conferences, a middle school party and grades that are due soon!

The conference in Beijing was nice. It was fun to see people from the NY training again and here about everyone's adjustment to China. Highlights of the weekend included shopping at a huge import grocery store, eating Mexican food TWICE (once was even complimented with sangria!), and bringing home half of Ikea on the bus. My excuse was that I hadn't been there yet since I moved to TJ (that's where I got the lamp and bulletin board that I just put up).

This year's birthday celebrations included: Starbucks at the BJ airport, the traditional game of Catan in the hotel lobby, the entire conference singing to me at the banquet, and later, a small birthday party with friends, which was made complete by a mint chocolate cake! I couldn't have asked for more--it was a great celebration all around.


Pics:


My birthday crown/napkin.



Some of the wonderful middle school staff before the banquet.



The cake from Sunday's celebration.


Probably a month ago, I went shopping at the local fabric market. The place is completely overwhelming--picture a North American mall, but instead of stores like the Gap or Abercrombie, each store is an individual vendor with yards and yards of every kind of fabric imaginable. The experience is such a sensory overload, but that was compounded this trip because I didn't know what exactly I was looking for. After many long hours of searching, I found materials for a shower curtain, curtains for my room and a duvet for my bed. I gave the tailor all the fabric right before the holiday. I got all the curtains back this week (partially what prompted the cleaning/decorating spree).



How cute is that?


Funny story: Imagine my surprise, when, at Ikea, I spotted the same shower curtain. Granted, it wasn't in the same raw form that I found mine at the fabric market, but they pretty much look identical. Check it out here. I would never have guessed that I had such good taste!

Another funny story: We have tile wall in our bathroom. I write my words from our Chinese class on the wall with dry erase marker to give me more exposure to the vocab. I had Chinese early in the week and so erased random vocab that had accumulated since August before I showered the other night. It was late (like 11.30 at night) when I was taking my shower and I started to notice that some of the letters were slipping down. I thought I was going crazy and was just seeing things.



Here's what the wall above the sink looks like=normal.



Here's the crazy words from the wall that's actually in the shower. The q at the bottom should be next to the i and the u across from basketball--it migrated quite a distance.



Here's a shot of the wall in front of the toilet, right next to the shower. The o from corn dropped completely into pineapple!


Praise: A miracle has occurred in our community. A family had been fostered a little girl since Christmas and were hoping to adopt her when her file was sent to the US and she was matched with another family. It was looking almost certain that that family would be traveling here to get her by the end of the month. Somehow (only by His grace and mercy) the family has reconsidered and has since agreed to send the file back to China, which allows my friends the opportunity to continue pursuing her adoption. This little girl has experienced lots of trauma in her young life, so please give Thanks with our community and continue to Think about their situation.


Because of Him,

rpm