Still alive

If there's any confusion regarding the title of this post, let me explain. I'm not about to recount some harrowing near-death experience, but rather it's a reference to the prolonged lack of posts which has been brought to my attention by my many readers. And by "many", I mean "between one and two". So here's a summary of the past 3 months:

Most things have been the same- Lorraine is still here, teaching with Michelle and me, and I still have mostly the same amount of students and classes, although a few have changed. The cold has cut down on bike riding/jianzi playing, but I still ride my bike to and from school, and play jianzi when we can find some semi-warm place to play. Also my camera's still broken.

Tom (my Kiwi classmate) had a Christmas party, in which we had some boxing matches to celebrate Boxing Day (a few days early). Since the only other guy in my weightclass (see: middle schoolers) dropped out, Tom said that he'd box me, but to make it fair, he'd only use one hand. We also all had costumes. Then Tom left China, which was lame, because we still hadn't made The Ping Pong Kid movie or done a lot of other things we were planning. Now he's back in The Shire, eating sheep, having barbecues for Christmas, and living free from fear of the abundant, non-poisonous animals that inhabit their little islands.

Christmas was nice. I did a lot of Christmas activities and talked about the Christmas story in my classes, and taught our kids Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. We had a Secret Santa gift exchange at our school in which my name was misread as "Michelle", and thus I received a nice pair of sparkly butterfly earrings. I think they'll go well with the rainbow-colored glass dragon necklace I got from one of my students. Also, I received socks, which were surprisingly un-feminine. On Christmas day, we went snow tubing.

For New Year's we didn't set off any fireworks (couldn't find any, as hard to believe as that sounds), but we did eat some delicious Stroop Waffles with some Dutch friends. They were a blast- and they taught us some useful Dutch phrases, like "pipidipip! Yahoo!" and "muda cook".

That's about all that's happened of note that I can think of. Just one more month left, and then back to the motherland!

P.S. I decided to turn No-shave November into No-shave winter. Having a thin beard, it's not as out of control as it might sound. It's kind of like what my brother Steve looks like if he doesn't shave for a week or two.