Ten Pounds of Reasonably Priced Cheese

Apparently I'm as good at blogging as I am at keeping a diary.  I think I have one or two lying around somewhere in storage each with no more than 10 days of entries from various stages of my life, all offering proof that I would rather go out and do something rather than write about it.  However, I figure I need to do a better job with the blogs for two reasons.  The first is that when it comes time to write my first-year report for the Olmsted Foundation, I plan on putting it off for so long that I have no other choice but to come to this blog so I can copy and paste all of the entries into the report and call it a day (for any foundation staff reading this blog, I'm almost completely kidding).  The second reason is that we have a lot of friends and family who read this and probably got hooked on my literary prowess after only a few paragraphs.  I feel like I owe it to them for not forewarning them about how addictive reading about my life can be.

Anyway, if you're still reading at this point, I stand firm behind the validity of my second reason.  This will be a short update about what has been going on with us and then I plan on two more rapid-fire entries to update you on some of our travels and provide a few pictures because my photography skills are right up there on par with my writing skills...and my ninja skills.

As far as school is concerned, I'm still feeling like I'm in over my head.  I'm keeping up with what is going on in class and I'm usually aware of the topics being discussed if not the details, but we're about two months away from the end of the semester now and I still haven't had a homework assignment yet.  Actually that's not true.  In one class, we were told to translate two entries from an anthropology dictionary into Chinese.  I spent some late nights getting it done, only to show up at the next class and find out I was the only one who did it.  Additionally, the professor never asked for us to turn it in.  In another class, we had to write an essay (5000 characters or roughly 2500 words in English) about one of four topics.  All of the reference material is in Chinese and a week before the assignment was due, I still had not received my library card for the campus library.  I went to the teacher and explained my situation as well as the fact that Chinese is hard.  He said no problem (he also knows that I'm a master's student in his PhD class for reasons we still have yet to figure out) and that I could turn it in whenever I get it done.  The next week, I expected to see everybody else turning in their papers.  They either turned them in directly to his office or they didn't do them either because nobody had papers.  It seems that our entire grades will come down to final exams or final essays (the teacher gets to decide) which means I'm pretty much screwed.

One the home front, Kate and the boys are both doing well.  Stephen is starting to speak more and more Chinese (he also understands more than he lets on) and David is walking up a storm and has even ventured into climbing.  David celebrated his 1st birthday with a cake and a few days later, a trip to Chengdu.  Also, after only a little over three months (guys from the embassy thought that was pretty fast) our household goods finally arrived.  We got the arrival date about 5 days in advance so we were pretty excited.  On the date the shipment was supposed to arrive, we got a call from the mover about 15 minutes before the scheduled delivery time and were told that the truck was too big to drive into our part of town during that day, and that they had to wait until after 8pm to make the delivery.  I asked if they could simply put the delivery on to several smaller trucks and they said no.  I told them they were full of crap (not really because I don't know how to say that in Chinese) because our other shipment came in the middle of the day in a smaller truck, but they assured me, they couldn't do that.  What followed was an agonizingly long 9-hour wait.  At 8:30pm, when the movers finally arrived, they had broken everything down into three smaller moving trucks, all of which could have come into our part of town during the day.  At about 12:30am (for every one person that carried a box, there were two that stood around) all the boxes were unloaded and in our apartment and at 1:30am, we finally told them to stop unpacking and go home.  Kate then spent the next three-and-a-half days in some kind of heightened state of organizing and got everything unpacked and put away.  Think Beautiful Mind but with unpacking instead of math and only slightly less craziness.  I don't know how she did it (she's amazing) but I do know that I can now scratch "watch a guy in a dirty sport coat and loafers move household goods into my apartment at midnight" off of my bucket list.

To sum it all up, school is hard, the boys are crazy, we still like China, and we have our stuff.  Enjoy the travel stories that should follow shortly.  Also, Kate would like me to point out that today we spent about $75 on a block of cheese.  Granted, it was an over 10-pound block of cheese (jealous Stew?) and for cheese in China it was pretty reasonably priced, but seriously?  It wasn't even fancy cheese, just regular old Irish cheddar.  It did however, just give me the inspiration for the title of this article so I'll finish by saying, "That'll do cheese, that'll do."