I love the story Jesus tells about the woman and the lost coin. You see, I am forever losing things—my car keys, my six pairs of reading glasses, my 50 percent off coupon for the carwash, my pen, my favorite sandals. I wish I had one of those beeper things for every item in my [...]

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My computer broke. Crash-o-rama. First time in my laptop history that I’ve had a computer crash on me. It’s at the computer doctor right now having a dataectomy. I pray it all gets transferred. My life is on that laptop! Lord have mercy! Daryl and I spent a week in sunny Mexico for our vacation. [...]

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I was just a big ol’ dumb, white girl from Kansas living in a city of 1.5 million Chineesers. In fact, in the fall of 1983, there were only about 15 foreigners total in our city of Changchun (this was the old Manchuria). I was there with two other women and we were the first [...]

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The Chinese government had a funny way of doing things back in the day when I first started teaching there. The Communist Party had a strict policy protecting its citizens from the invasion of dangerous stuff like “foreign ideas and philosophies” coming into the country through the massive influx of English teachers from the West. [...]

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If this is your first visit to this blog, please look around and read one of the older posts. I recommend “Redemption Can Be Found in Every Pile of Garbage” or “Mean Old Lao Deng” which is really good for the Christmas season. For those who are regular readers, I wanted to let you know [...]

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Well, Happy Thanksgiving everybody! We’re celebrating with a pretty big group–almost 30 at my SGC’s house. (That’s sister-girlfriend-cousin). We’ll be doin’ the traditional meal wearing our matching Paula Deen aprons. I love Thanksgiving ’cause it’s all about the food. (Also my SGC is actually Daryl’s cousin, but I love her so much that I claim [...]

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C.S. Lewis said that too often educators approach teaching as deforestation. You go in and tear down every preconceived notion, pull up roots of ignorance and clear the land for planting. According to Lewis, that is the absolutely wrong approach. To his mind, we should be irrigating deserts. Bringing knowledge, life, learning, information, worldview to [...]

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Effects of Aging Clay: aging lends better workability to clay. To age clay, it is left open to the air for a day or two after mixing. This allows microscopic organisms to move into and grow within the clay. These organisms add more plasticity to the clay. The one drawback aged clay has is that [...]

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Yang Ai was the first chubby Chinese person I had ever met. I loved her immediately—yes! At first sight. She was jolly, jovial, with a face like a little pixie doll. She was assigned to me by the university to help with my research project; part of my dissertation work. I was researching exam-driven education [...]

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IICS, the organization Big D and I work for ( www.iics.com) has its annual conference every July. It’s a time of great fellowship, amazing speakers and it’s a time when IICS profs come home from the field and share their stories—stories of how God has moved on the lives of their students, colleagues and neighbors. [...]

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