Radio silence

What do you do when you have nothing nice to say? You do what your Momma told you to; you say nothing. So, I know I haven't been posting alot lately, and it's mostly because for a little while there, I lost the plot. Or, if not the plot, at least my sense of humour. While I know that I can be a bit of a cynic, I like to think that my natural, god-given negativism is balanced by a healthy sense of humour. And, up until this year, it's carried me pretty far.

But circumstances here felt, for awhile anyway, completely hopeless. The power was going off all the time; occasionally at work. Water came, briefly, and then went off again. The official day for the heat to be turned on was November 1st and we didn't quite make it. If there's anything that's gonna make me lose my cool, it's being cold. So, I huddled at home next to a Chinese heater (which is nothing like a space heater at home. Chinese heaters glow nuclear orange, almost burn your skin if you get to close but give off absolutely no heat unless you are within a foot of them) and focused all my energy on metabolizing.

The school, both helping and hindering, looked into various possibilities. We were going to move to a different school in Shenyang. We were going to move to a different building in Dalian. We were staying but things were going to be fixed. Nope, we were going to move again. An ex-co-worker and I had a firm policy. "No crying at work." For the first time in my life, I broke that policy. Twice. In one week. But, knock on wood, everything's been running smoothly for a week, and we're here for good.

Now, I think that every job has an adjustment period. There's always going to be a month or two where you hit the ground running and realize that maybe you don't quite know the path you should be following yet. With all of the other nonsense going on...it's hard to focus on work when you have to run home three times in one day to show workers where the bathtub is leaking...I hadn't really been feeling like I'm here to do a job. This week, though, I hit my stride. I've been running the path for awhile now, but I've stopped to look at the map, figure out where I'm going and what I'm headed into, and wow. One month out of library school and I thought I could start up and run a library? In China? What was I thinking?