Yo-ho, yo-ho. An expatriate's life for me.

I know what you’re thinking, and yes, it’s been a long time (over a month? Sheesh!). In my defence, I’ve been busy.

Aitch, Aay, Double El, Oh...

Another month, another six blogs I didn’t write.

Semester five is about halfway through, and at this point I’ve not written in an embarrassingly long time. Not that it is any consolation, but I have thought about writing. In fact, I have two half-written blogs from this month taking up space on my hard drive.

Not that any of that matters. What matters is what I publish. My lack of output is directly related to the amount of work I have this semester. I am teaching the PC-standard 16 hours per week. However, the overwhelming part is that of those 16 hours, I have seven different preps in a week. It is, in a word, yucky.

Despite having 553 things to do at all times, I have been feeling incredibly guilty due to my lack of updating. Combine that with a weird instance from last weekend and not yet writing a post about Halloween, here I am writing instead of grading the 120 midterms on my tea table.

Home and Back

See?! Weird!

One of the many lessons Peace Corps has taught me: America is weird. The Elkhart County Fair serves deep-fried butter... However, before I go on, I should back up…

A Return to Form

I went running today—my first since being back—and it was beautiful.

Lights. Camera...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Once upon a time, th…

Oh. Okay. You’ve heard that one? Yeah… I thought so.

traveltraveltravel.

I know what you're thinking: "He wrote in December all about how he was going to be more proactive with his blog. He promised writing, and hasn't posted since... He's got a lot of nerve showing his face around here again."

Maybe you're kinder than that. If so, thanks. If not, I KNOW! I am the worst. There are two reasons for my absence. First and most serious, my VPN hasn't been working at all. Without it, I'm trapped behind the Great Firewall, and therefore cannot post. I have been unable. That doesn't mean, however, that I haven't been writing. I have quite the backlog that I need to publish (sound familiar?). At the current moment, I'm mooching a friend's VPN and thought I might have enough time to post something. 

The other, more awesome reason I've not posted in a while is because I've been busy. Busy travelling. I spent the entire month of January and the first half of February enjoying everything Yunnan has to offer (and making a pitstop in Chengdu for IST). I will talk more about all of that at a later date. However in the meantime, I'd like to ask anyone reading to remember how happy I was about my summer travel...