What a difference a year makes

I don't have amnesia from head trauma and I haven't had an onset case of early age dementia. I realize the last time I blogged was almost 11 months ago. Not real sure why it's taken me this long to get back to it, but it might have something to do with a whirlwind summer last year and then being busy on skype a lot calling back to the US several times a week. But I'll give a quick update for all my faithful readers (Mom and...well really just mom) who thought this was a lost cause.

Since the last time I posted:

-Moved into a new apartment. This one is more secluded, with more construction around it, closer to campus and with about 1/10 of the water supply of my last place. They shut it off now for all but about 2 or 3 hours a day. Welcome to the developing (...kinda) third world!

-Ran through about 4 Chinese teachers. Some realized they were severely underpaid by our school. Others had other programs to enter themselves. The one I'm stuck with now has drunk dialed me twice in the last week.

-I came back to the US twice for brief stints (once to take classes and once to recruit people to our short-term program here with the company I'm with.

And really everything else revolves around meeting Karen Sharp on the first of those stints, then proposing to her 6 months later in North Carolina after my recruiting time. So now I'm back in China for just over another month. Trying to help my lovely fiancee figure out how to plan for the future from several thousand miles away and set a new course for both of our lives. I honestly don't have much work in this process compared to her so I've tried to do the easy stuff like getting a couple guest lists together, planning the honeymoon, unleashing the great power of my mom to help plan the events in NC.

Karen is, among many other things, a literary genius so I'll have to decide soon if we should make a blog together or if I should keep this my thing and let her write our prayer letters, which she apparently loves doing. I really hit the jackpot.

Hope to post more soon, especially now with things winding down and eras shifting in the next two months.