another weekend's end

I don't have anything exciting or creative to post about, but I feel like I should before the weekend is over.

I spent the weekend meeting with friends for dinner every night, finishing up cleaning my new apartment (after the painters left a huge mess), finishing grading elementary mid-terms, doing some shopping, and a little cooking. I made a batch of pumpkin bread and shared it with the office and with friends and made some spaghetti sauce this afternoon. When I came back from dinner, my room smelled so good from the cooking. I think I'm going to have some students over this week to make pizza together as a reward for winning the skit contest in our class a few weeks ago.

Now that I cleaned up the paint mess, I'm getting excited about moving in. I'll wait at least another week or so, though. I'm working on making a decision about what to do next semester. Meeting with a teacher from the university downtown this week to see what her take is. Should make a decision this week, so you can think about that with me.

Well, that's enough of the me talk (as if this blog isn't all about me anyhow). Maybe I'll post something a little more creative later.

bits of life

Yesterday morning was so cold and there was this beautiful frost on the leaves and grass. I tried to get a few pictures and of course they didn't turn out so beautiful, but here's one of some pine needles anyway.

We have a sculpture park outside my dormitory. This holey brick thing is the latest addition. I'm all for sculpture gardens, but I sort of wonder why the person who is giving money for these sculptures wouldn't give it to something a little more useful like hot water for the students or another computer lab since the sculpture garden is getting full.

This is the latest rave in the school supermarket. It's fried chicken strips and lettuce inside a tortilla! The first time someone bought one of these, we were all in total shock that they actually sell this at our school. The funny part is that the brand is KXC instead of KFC. Too bad we can't buy tortillas by themselves anywhere in town.

One of the new teachers has had all these bathroom troubles. Her bathroom has been leaking on the person below her, so she had to get a new toilet and bathtub. They tried first to fix the two but that lasted about a month before things started to get worse. The cement they put in under the bathtub to try to fix it was uneven, which made the bathtub crack more. She was in the middle of dealing with the cranky lady below her, ordering a new (used!) bathtub and dealing with the new toilet not working like it's supposed to when she made the remark "nothing was broken until they fixed it!". A classic line, we all agreed.

Today, 15 minutes into my last class, the power went out. It was 4:15 and the sun was setting. By about 4:30, the sun had set so I gave in and let the class go early. It was impossible to read either the board or their books at that point and we had exhausted my box of charade vocabulary review. I went back to the office and found a few teachers there in the darkness with candles doing speaking tests. I walked through the hall and found it lit up by students using their phones as flashlights. In my room, I lit all my candles to make a romantic glow in my room and was just contemplating what to cook for dinner (I have a gas stove) when the power came back on.

a lovely morning

It's Sunday morning. I've got biscuits in the oven, hot coffee from my coffee press, some good music on, my skin smells so good with the bergamot coriander lotion my sister brought me, and it's SNOWING! I mean, could it get any better? Well, I guess I could think of a few things I could add, but let's just enjoy this.

It's a habit of mine to look out the window when I get up. This morning when I did, I tried to discern whether it was snow or rain. When I got out of the shower, it was definitely snow. It's not sticking or anything, and it still has the weight of rain instead of being able to drift around a little before it hits the ground, but it's officially our first snow! Not quite as dramatic as last year's, but still lovely.

Well, I have biscuits to eat and need to get ready for the day. More later.

this week's addiction

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven….I admire the authority of believing on one’s knees in front of the event.
Harold Brodkey, “Manipulations”
(quoted in Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer)

I started Into Thin Air, a first-person account of what happened on a trip up Everest in 1996, Monday at lunch. I spent all the spare time I had this week glued to the pages and finished it yesterday at lunch. I think since I saw Everest this summer and felt a little of the effects of being at base camp in Tibet at high altitude, I was really captivated by their story and the pull of the summit. I did still fit in a little bit of cooking for a teacher's birthday party on Tuesday night, a little language study and a few sets of essays graded in between my hours of addiction to this book.

The heat has been on all week and my apartment has been so warm! After visiting a friend's house in the middle of the week who hadn't had her heat turned on yet (most apartments are controlled centrally), I was even more grateful. Yesterday, a teacher swore he saw a snow flurry or two, but we think he was actually just trying to make his prediction that it would snow within the week come true. It was just thick drops of rain.

flannel and pumpkin

I mentioned at the end of the summer that I stole Rachael's flannel sheets after she left. I put them on this week and they are a little too inviting. I got home yesterday at about 6pm after a day of meeting people downtown, some shopping, and a trip to check out the clean up job at my new apartment (more on that later). It was actually a pretty warm afternoon, but after I got home and got still with a good book, the room got colder and I got under the sheets to warm up before I got around to finishing scoring some tests. Well, getting under the covers with a good book turned into a short nap and then I wasn't good for much for the rest of the night, although I did get some dishes done and made a little progress on the tests.

Today, being Sunday and all, I have less ambitions for getting stuff done, but still the coolness of my room (the boiler, we hear, has been fired up, but isn't producing much heat yet after a summer of rest) is keeping me under the covers listening to podcasts or finishing up this book instead of studying language at the table. I did decide, with one chapter left in the book, that I should save that for bedtime and put on another layer to post a blog and make a birthday card for someone in the office.

I bought my first nan gua (pumpkin, or squash) this week and boiled it today to make a pumpkin mush for use in pumpkin bread later on this week or next. That's a new fall/winter tradition I started last year. When the weather gets cold, it's time for some pumpkin bread!

Oh yeah, about the apartment. I had it painted on Wednesday. The guy brought nothing to cover anything. I was glad I left the cover on the couch and hadn't brought anything important to the apartment yet. He left the biggest mess I had ever seen on the floor. Cigarette butts, chopsticks from his ordered in lunch, paint in puddles on the floor. I got a student to help me call and complain to the store and they came in a group to clean it up the next night. I stayed to help and supervise, but they assured me that they would do it themselves. I went to check on it yesterday. They made progress by scraping the paint off the floor and off most of the furniture (furniture that comes with the apartment), but still left a lot to be done with paint left unscraped behind doors and in thin layers on the floor where they had cleaned it then wiped it and walked through and tracked it through the apartment again. I am not angry, but just frustrated. I think it'll just be easier to do it myself this time.

fall fruit

I bought these beautiful small apples on Saturday. The fruit lady got me to try them first. Even though they were a little expensive (10 kuai per kilo, which is about $1.25), they were so sweet and so beautiful that I bought half a kilo. I also bought a few pears and yellow mandarin oranges. Fall fruit is great!

instant plants

A lady selling plants outside the used market on Saturday. She has many of them in old instant noodle bowls!