Back to (School) Work

Hello folks! This will be a hodge-podge entry. My camera had been busted in one way or another for the past month, but I finally got it working again. School is in full-swing. I have about 200 students altogether. I tend to give them too much homework, and then I spend all my time grading it. I'm having a great time though. I think I have the best job ever. I seem to have bad luck with pets. I don't want to get into it because it makes me too sad, but after I lost Silas I got a 3 month-old kitten named Percy. Sadly, he passed away last week. In memory of my poor cat, here are two pictures to show how cute he was. Percy was extremely interested in the toilet. He liked to jump up to the rim and hang there, staring at the mysterious water. I think he wanted to get a drink, but he could never quite reach it.

In other news, I finally got a new lock on my door. A nice fellow came over and worked on it all morning. He had to take the old one out with an electic saw and weld the new one onto the metal door.
He did this without a mask or equipment of any kind. He didn't even wear shoes! I sneaked this picture of him from my living room.

Next week is a major holiday in China. It's both the autumn festival and the 60th anniversary of the Chinese Republic. Traditionally people eat mooncakes (a kind of fat little cookie) for autumn festival. My boss came by and dropped off a fancy box full of mooncakes as a gift. See the picture? Each of those little containers holds its own individually wrapped mooncake. We get 8 days of vacation time for the holiday, but oddly enough, the school wants us to "make-up" part of the lost class time on the weekends. So I'll be teaching my Thursday class on Saturday instead. I don't know why they bother having vacation time that they have to make-up. But Chinese people can be strange.