Biding my time

(Laura circa 1987)

June has come and has almost passed! I've been graduated for a good whole month now and I'm trying to stay occupied and motivated in the Golden City-- Topeka, KS. It's more like Depression and Low Self-Esteem City some days, but I'm attempting to be positive about the summer in my hometown. Last summer was spent working at the highly glamorous NASA Langley Research Center and the summer before that I spent in the highly glamorous mountains of rural China. So, of course, Topeka seems less than exotic. But I'm glad that I get to spend a few short months with my family before I head overseas for a year.

Despite a slow summer so far, I haven't been motivated enough to get a part-time job for the next couple of months. I figured that I'll have plenty of work to do the rest of my life. So the days have gone by while I paint practically the entire house and mow the yard. Volunteering at CPO has been a blessing, and I've also been able to visit my 94 year old grandmother a lot more frequently than when I was 1200 miles away in Virginia.

In the back of my mind, I've been thinking a lot about China. My departure date is August 28th for training in Los Angeles and then September 16th for Beijing. It's practically a full-time job just getting paperwork and little visa pictures ready! I had to hunt around the whole city for a place to get 16 passport-size pictures taken with a BLUE background, which China requires. Not a single place had a blue background; only white. So I finally bought some blue poster board and made Walgreen's hang it up for me. In addition, I had to find a professor in the middle of the summer to rewrite my letter of recommendation for the Chinese school I'll be assigned to. Apparently the letter he had written was deemed "too political." I've also been trying to forget about all the countless blood tests and X-rays I've had to get taken.

While little frustrations keep cropping up, I've been reading some good books on China and practicing learning a bit of Mandarin. I just finished a really truthful book about life in the mainland through three generations of women called, Wild Swans, which is banned there.

Well, folks, I best be going now. I've got to go slop the pigs and harvest the wheat before I hit the sack tonight.