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Becoming Texan
It’s been a while. The last post contained the weather report for the Dallas area; fortunately we did not melt. We’re alive and well.
Sarah and I are slowly becoming Texan. At least, our car and id’s are – I can’t say much about the accents and cowboy hats. Yet. But we have jumped through the hurdles of getting new plates for our car and driver’s licenses for us, so when we need to show ID we won’t have to pull out our NY and CA cards anymore. Considering the pictures on the licenses, we won’t miss them much! Our stuff is also becoming Texan, as two weekends ago we travelled to Houston to get our shipment from China signed in from customs and picked up from the warehouse. Everything went smoothly there, and it’s good to have couches again.
Before the craziness of the school year starts, Sarah and I decided to take a break. My family had a yearly tradition of heading to Holden Beach for a week, though the last 8 years have kept everyone busy with college schedules and weddings and such. We couldn’t book flights due to the unpredictable nature of our shipment from China, so we ended up taking a 19-hour car ride instead. It was a relaxing time as we could build some sand castles, play some heated games of Catan and get some free reading in. (I’m calling it free reading even though I haven’t started full time at DTS – but I’ll have tons of required reading to do soon enough!) We saw some beautiful sights on the beach. I also saw the Dolorian and a beached whale.
We saw some sea turtles coming out of their eggs and heading to the ocean, but no pictures. We wouldn’t want them to head toward false moons – even a flash from a camera could confuse them.
We’re also enjoying the Olympics, watching it when we can. I saw this historical map of Olympic medals and thought it was pretty cool.
Sarah has started work, and I’m talking with places in the area and getting ready to head back to school on Thursday, this time as a student. A shout out to all the CDISers – we miss you guys! Hope the year is going well!
That’s all for now… I have to go find my cowboy hat and work on my accent.
Long time no post…
It’s been a while… but this will be short. More commentary to come.
Even though the earthquake has changed plans, we have still been finishing up the school year and preparing to make the transition back to the States. So after our adjusted High School trip to areas affected by the earthquake, we have had:
- a music concert
- a student awards ceremony
- a staff banquet
- finals
- graduation
- movers come take much of our stuff
- sales to get rid of much of the rest
- and lots of goodbyes.
We have lots of pictues of many of the above mentioned activities; for now most of the pictures are in albums on Sarah’s facebook profile. We appreciate your thoughts as we prepare to leave China for the foreseeable future on Thursday. Thanks!
SCC
Tonight was the night Steven Curtis Chapman was supposed to grace our Chinese city with a concert. Yep, I said supposed to: it didn’t work out. While the other cities were still able to arrange a concert, our city’s western location has created some tension. So although a local university was originally willing to let us use their 1,700 seat auditorium for the concert as a way to support the arts for their students, they decided to cancel with very little time for the concert organizers to reschedule. We weren’t the only casualty: another sporting event at the university sure to draw a large crowd was also canceled. I thought about putting on a concert myself; after all, Steven replaced me for a special music while I was at Cedarville. I could just repay the favor, right? :-) Alas, it was not to be.
We are coming to the end. We had our last company meeting last night; tears were shed. While I write this people are rummaging through our stuff, looking for their own buried treasure in our used stuff. Tonight I had a dinner meeting with old and new student government officers that was also attended by a different advisor to take the reins next year.
We are heading towards a new beginning. This week our school booked our international flight to the States, so we arrive at Binghamton Regional Airport on Thursday, June 12th at 11.25pm. Or later. I received my financial aid letter from Dallas Seminary this morning; it was a help and relief for my fall tuition bill. I met a couple today who run a coffee house with two locations I am aware of: one in Chengdu, and one north of Dallas, TX. These and more are making the transition more real, feasible, and smooth.
In other news, I had chocolate milk with my lunch today. It was good. I highly encourage drinking chocolate milk every once in a while.
This is the final post…
…from our desktop computer. Don’t worry - we plan to keep updating this site for awhile!
We are currently in the middle of the transition process, which right now includes selling all unnecessary items. We bought this desktop computer when we came to China; though it is much newer than our laptop (5 years old, but still ticking! They’re both Dells, if you care), it is much larger as well. (I know - a desktop is bigger than a laptop. It suprised me too.) So, all of our music, pictures, and the rest are being transferred to a portable hard drive, and soon our computer will belong to someone else.
This sounds a bit like an eulogy. For a computer. Is that weird? I mean, I expect such fanatisim from an apple user, but maybe I’m going a little overboard. Anyway.
We had an absolutely beautiful weekend here. Sarah presided over the annual solo and ensemble competition, while I took a much needed weekend off. The sun was out in full force, which is an oddity for our cloudy city, so some students took advantage of the rays…for six hours. At least one didn’t come to school yesterday due to his sunburn.
Many more “moving” stories to come…