Back to School

Hello everyone!
Sorry I have been MIA for the past week. I have been without Internet and it just got turned back on today. Yea! I started school again on Monday and it feels good. I really like all my classes and teachers and I am happy to be learning Chinese again. I am in class with Laura and Deborah now, so that's fun too. Other than that I have been working on my research. I weighed all my filters again so am now starting to accumulate data and will be calibrating my equipment (post-sampling...oh well!) hopefully next Monday or Tuesday before sending it all on its merry way back to the UW. The reason I had to wait to calibrate it is because they had to make me a special burette. It's not really that special, but SU didn't have one, so I had to pay for the supplier to make one special and it was supposed to be delivered today (Friday) but was not, so hopefully it will be here early next week.
Laura and I have been craving Western food this week, so we made ourselves fried egg sandwiches for dinner, which were delicious.
Not alot going on, except Li Juan trying to make us eat weird food and us covertly throwing it away when she is not home. Although, we did meat a vacuum-packed duck the other day which wasn't that bad.
In other news, Laura got hit by a little yellow mini car while she was riding her bike one day. Thankfully she wasn't hurt, but she was thrown off her bike and onto the ground. The guy who hit her just waved and drove away. I wish he would have rolled down his window and said "Hellooooo" in the sing-song-y way only Chinese non-English speakers can. That would have really completed the hilarity of the whole thing. Best be careful. I can tell I am not used to riding my bike because all the dodging seems alot more perilous again.
Above are two pictures I just got from Deborah from Xilinxue Shan (the ski mountain) when we went during Christmas. The top is the ski map, professing lots of beautiful runs and snow. The bottom in the "real" scenario, where there is this little patch of man made snow/ice that is not even worthy of the description "bunny hill" and alot of brown, dead grass. They say pictures are worth a thousand words, well these are worth about a million each. No, there are no words.

I will also leave you with the Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous, which was originally written by Reinhold Niebuhr, a pastor of an Evangelical & Reformed Church in Detroit in the 1920's, and seems especially fitting to China:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.