Grow Blog

A friend wrote that as a bon voyage a while back. It had been taped to my kitchen wall. I never did memorize it, but fan feng shun is a good phrase for the week. Google translates it as ’smooth sailing,’ but more literally it means ’sail in the same direction as the wind.’ I have no idea if it’s an old phrase, but I like that ‘may the wind always be at your back’ is a cross-cultural idea.

And the wind has been firmly behind us, as our plan is executing itself nicely. It’s busy, but every task has been getting accomplished. There have yet to be any disasters. And now we are sitting in a hotel waiting for the caretaker of our car to come take us to a hotel closer to the airport. There, we will say goodbye to the stormtrooper wagon (for now) and we’ll hang out for the afternoon and evening before leaving in the morning for Kunming.

I’ve put zero effort into planning tourist activities in Kunming. We are basically going a couple days early just to get over jetlag and to loosen our Chinese tongues. I’ll schedule out the first few weeks of classes too–it will be a good test of my course-planning. Theoretically, I have all the necessary readings on my laptop, and my bibliography is living in the cloud.

The little baby scanner that L talked me into is working great. It’s enabled us to put all sorts of things into the cloud–and I like that. It is making our load lighter, and will greatly improve our bookkeeping. Speaking of which: we appear to be leaving Santa Barbara with our finances mostly intact. In other words: we are almost right on budget.

The next update should be from the eternal spring city. Stay tuned.