Sierralima

Keeping busy

I knew it had been a while since I updated this, but I hadn’t realized it has been almost one month. How time flies! It has been a really busy time for me. From the time of my last post until October 5 I was busy with the youth retreat and its preparations. One “nice” thing is that I had three days off of work before the official start, which meant I pretty much spent all that time with preparations, and meant I started my short nights a day early. This year was well thought out and planned, but made for a lot of preparations ahead of time. That is a good thing. I’m not sure how we made it through the previous retreats. Overall, the retreat was good. The kids had a great time. I enjoyed it as well, but had a different experience. I was “in charge” of putting together the video at the end of the retreat, so I spent most of my time working on that. Too much time – I need to not do the same thing next retreat… Now I’m working on putting together a DVD (or several – there is a lot of material) of the retreat lessons, dramas, etc. I need a bigger hard drive. 500GB is not big enough for editing 10 hours of high definition video, plus pictures.

The last time I made a post I was in Xi’an with Josh. It was a lot of fun having him around, and I’m glad it forced me to take a bit of a break from work. I managed to get a little extra sleep ahead of the retreat, but the highlight was hanging out with my cousin. We don’t get to do that much any more, which I guess is mostly my fault for moving to China. I had another trip to Xi’an this past week. Actually not Xi’an proper, but a “small” town (~250,000 people – small for China, big for American midwest) north of Xi’an about an hour called Yanliang. That was a last minute trip, the return being 48 hours after the decision to go. So I have flown into the Xianyang airport 3 times in the past 5 weeks. If things go as expected, it will become a lot more familiar in the next year.

Work is still busy, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. First flight is still looming, and the pressure is on to keep to the schedule (which still appears to be moving to the right). We are being asked to do some things that are unreasonable with the current schedule, so while the end result of the discussions won’t be much different than where we are now, it will be a painful road to get there.

So today I think I am mostly caught up on the sleep I missed during the retreat. Meetings and other work on the weekends prevent me from sleeping in, which is where I get caught up. For some reason, six hours of sleep waking up at 9am is much more restful than 6 hours waking up at 6:30. I did some cleaning today of the office, which desperately needed it. I threw out a bunch of papers, but otherwise just allocated the mess to other places around the office. It looks better at least. Still more work to do. (Overall, I’m doing a better job of keeping the place clean than I did 5 years ago. Wait, I have a maid now…)

Mom and dad – I promise to call you soon.