Today was a pretty good day.

It had a great start because it was another absolutely gorgeous day — sunny for a good chunk of the day, with nice cool weather. Just last week we were suffering in the sweltering heat. Hopefully this weather lasts; SS and I are getting our wedding photos taken on Saturday.

I had my first classes of the new sester today. The first class, “Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics” was OK. The first lecture was a bit obstruse, covering semiotic theory as it relates to Chinese. It wasn’t too bad though, because it was review. The second class is “Critical Discourse Analysis,” and it seemed pretty interesting (even if a lot of the theory we’re going to be studying comes from Marxists). The teacher seems really cool.

Today was also good because I finally turned in my papers for the last semester. There were two 4,000 character (6 page) papers and one 3,000 character (5 page) papers. I wrote them all in only 4 days: most of the day Saturday and Sunday, then Monday and Tuesday nights. Last night my classmate came over and helped me fix any problematic stuff. Fortunately (and amazingly) there were not too many problems. (At 11,000 characters, though, it still took us three hours.)

SS was really on my case for not starting earlier on those papers, and she’s right, but oh well. It’s done. I did an OK job on them. My lack of writing is somewhat compensated for by my choice of interesting topics and a unique viewpoint.

The topics were:

• Comparison and analysis of the English racial slurs nigger, chink, and round-eye
• The word “laowai” in foreigners’ eyes
• Traditional Chinese grammar instruction and the lexical approach This weekend Greg Kummery is triumphantly returning to China, and my Japanese friend Nobuhiko is also visiting.

Also, the time has come for SS and me to decide which flooring to use in our new apartment, etc.

Busy busy.