Always an Adventure...

To all my American friends out there, Happy Thanksgiving! I know Canadian Thanksgiving was awhile ago, but when you live in an international community, all the holidays kind of blend together. This year, Canadian Thanksgiving happened to be the same weekend as Taiwan's Double 10 holiday (national day) so both had a long weekend. This weekend I'm planning a short trip to Taipei to watch The Help with friends and attend a Thanksgiving dinner with friends from many different countries :) I was thinking lately that it's been more than 5 years since I've seen snow! It's cooled off enough that I've started to take out my winter clothes, and even wore long pants the other day, but it's still above 20 degrees here. It certainly doesn't feel like winter. In fact, because of the work I do, the seasons get quite confusing. At the moment, I'm writing tests for March, proofreading things coming out in February, and preparing teaching lessons for December. Plus...

Well email posting so far is rather disappointing... I tried to send this 3 times before it would show up...and then the text was missing, so I had to email the text to myself separately and then copy and paste it here. So much for that idea, but I'll try again sometime, maybe without photo? This semester I'm doing a lot of my work from home, which is nice unless they're renovating the apartment next door all month. Fortunately the local Starbucks is nice and quiet during the day. They just got their long-awaited (maybe just by me) Christmas drinks! Note also that I come here so often that I have my own cup, which they pull out as soon as I walk through the door! I even get a small discount for using it. Time to plan my lesson for this afternoon which will be somewhat challenging since I lent out my textbook to a student who forgot his and just realized that I never got it back... Has that ever happened to you?

Tuesday, October 18: My poor little old scooter had a rough day today! It has been through a lot in the 3+ years I have owned it. Since I bought it from a teacher who was moving back to the U.S. for about US$200, it has driven me through rainy Yilan winters, made it all the way around Taiwan, and carried many guests, including my grandma, not to mention getting me to and from all the various schools I teach at. This semester, I need to drive almost twice as much and started thinking about upgrading a little, after all my little scooter was already 12+ years old when I bought it.  Now 3 years later, I was thinking it was time to switch. But I was still a little hesitant, did I really need a new scooter? Was this a good investment? I’d been to look at some secondhand scooters last week, and still hadn’t reached a decision. Then two very odd things happened today. First, when I went to drive to school this afternoon, I found that my rear tire was almost completely flat. I ended up...

Our first week in Yuli October 16, 2004 I arrived in Taiwan with no idea what I'd be getting into. I was originally only planning to be here for one year... but 7 years later I can say that I truly enjoy my life here. It still feels a little surreal that it's really been 7 years. They do all kind of blend together after awhile, there was the year in Yuli, the year I broke my leg, the year I started commuting to Taipei, and so much in between. A song that I've been listening to a lot lately is Never Once by Matt Redman, and part of the lyrics say: Scars and struggles on the way//but with joy our hearts can say// Yes our hearts can say// never once, did we ever walk alone// never once, did you leave us on our own// you are faithful//God you are faithful I've had plenty of struggles along the way, and one long scar down my left ankle, but it's true God has been so faithful in big and little things, and it is true, never once in these 7 years have I ever walked ...

Fun facts about Sun Moon Lake it is in Nantou county in the center of Taiwan it took us about 2 hours to get into the water after we registered there were over 20,000 participants in the swim I got kicked a lot we had a group of 13 we were interviewed just before getting in the water and were spotted on tv by friends  we swam 3.3km  it took me 2.5 hours I got a certificate, towel, and polo shirt for completing the swim they had rest stations every 100 meters where you could get water, chocolate, rice and other things for free we were required to wear the orange swim caps we were issued and bring a flotation device into the water the two oddest things I saw people bring into the water with them were a basketball and an umbrella maybe I should have brought an umbrella too, because I did get sunburned, and had a nice swim cap line across my forehead it was a great time... will I do it again? maybe in another 10 years... Before at the starting line ...

Ok, so I kind of fell off the 30 before 30 wagon, but I still have almost 7 months!! There are a number of things I was going to post about or wanted to post about... but it just didn't happen. I achieved two of my 30 before 30 goals, going to Hollywood (see pics here ), and swimming across Sun Moon Lake which really does deserve a post of its own. I also had a very eventful trip home, which included a trip to Banff with my sweet nephew, my grandparents' 50th anniversary, and my great grandmother's funeral (she also has a tribute post all written in my head) One of the reasons I haven't been posting is that I've been having issues with Chrome, which is the browser I normally use, not working, causing me to lose a couple of entries :S But I just set up email posting, so if I can get that figured out, maybe you'll suddenly see a lot more posts! This semester, I got a huge surprise when I found out I wouldn't be continuing my weekly commute to Taipei. In...

I'm here in class this week, and my brain is going into overload, filled with words like rheme, prosody, and discourse semantics. But speaking of fun words, our prof (who was teaching at Briercrest last semester - small world!) shared this website as a teaching tool or just for fun at www.wordle.net Here's a sample of what I got by inputting text from this blog, enjoy!