cavalcade • \kav-ul-KAYD\ • noun

Aug 03

Glad to Be Back

I just got back to Nebraska after a two day drive from Maryland, and I am very happy to be back for the following reasons:

1) I missed my cat.
2) I missed my family.
3) I finally have a shower head the enough pressure to take a real shower
4) Said shower doesn’t randomly switch from warm to cold to super hot while one is showering.
5) My house is so big and spacious!
6) I have a TV - even though I occasionally watched online TV, it seems that real commercials are essential to the TV watching experience. So is a remote (which I have, here in Nebraska!)
7) I don’t have to worry about leaving food on the counter and coming back to find that something nibbled on it while I was gone. In my dad’s defense, he really wanted to set traps, but me and Jay just felt too bad about killing the mouse.
8) The humidity is frizzing out my hair.
9) It’s nice to look out the window and see sky instead of a bunch of buildings.

Man - I didn’t realize how much I missed Nebraska until we got back. The place has really grown on me - I mean, I’ve lived here for 6 years, so I guess it shouldn’t be so unexpected. I’m a little sad that I’ll be leaving in a month and going back to Maryland for school. But I’m excited to start school out there too, especially since I decided to take Chinese classes.

I went to this function recently, and someone high up in the county government was the keynote speaker. He said that he’d just gotten back from a trip to China. The Chinese government invited a bunch of officials there to talk about teaching Chinese in American schools, and he was convinced. He’s now working to get Montgomery County schools to start teaching Mandarin, and it sounds like he want them to start in Kindergarten! I was convinced then, that Chinese is a worthwhile language to learn. Unlike some people, I don’t think Chinese is going to replace English any time soon, but the population of China is a huge percentage of the world’s population, so I think it’s important to be able to speak a language that so much of the world is using. Let’s just hope it’s not as hard as everyone says. The whole idea of a tonal language already has me scared though!