Sturm und Drang

It’s been an uneventful week here in Guangzhou. I can think of only ere only two things of note. One, the weather has been delightfully bad, with the skies going pitch black at three in the afternoon and serving up a deluge worthy of Noah, if it lasted more than a couple hours, complete with thunder, lightning, and gusting wind. I’d show you a picture, but it turns out to be quite challenging to take good pictures of a storm. I have a whole new level of respect for storm photographers. Come to think of it, it’s getting unusually dark outside as I type this. Perhaps we’re in for another spat of rain. And, it’s warm rain. You hear about this warm rain in books and movies, but growing up in Maine you don’t really experience it much – rain is rather cold, for the most part. Down here below the Tropic of Cancer, though, we’re well into what I consider hot weather (90 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, 88 today) and it’s humid on top of that. So, when a storm moves in, it doesn’t bring in cold air (the only thing blowing cold air is my air conditioner, bless it), and the rain falls through warm wet air and voila. Warm rain. Now I really need to invest in some galoshes.

Hmm. These galoshes are cute.

Two, I finished reading the Old Testament this week. I’ve been reading since August 1^st, at a rate of approximately 3.1 pages per day. Interesting fact: did you know the Old Testament is just over ¾ of the whole length of the Bible? Anyway, I’m on schedule to finish the whole book by the end of July. It’s very exciting. Not so much the text, although there are some pretty exciting bits (also a lot of horrifying bits), but the idea that I’ll have actually read the whole thing. I calculated what I’d read before beginning this project, and it amounted to less than 1/5 of the book (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Genesis, and Ruth). Hardly a sound foundation, now is it? I credit the read-through plan to Reverend Langworthy at United Parish in Fort Fairfield. She mentioned in church one Sunday that if you divide the Bible into 3 to 4 pages of reading per day, you can read it in a year. That really stuck to me, because reading the Bible feels like a monumental, nearly unconquerable task. On the other hand, reading 3.1 pages a day is the work of 10 minutes before bed. That’s nothing. Still, I expected to have given up by now, much like I half expected to have given up on regularly updating my blog by now. I haven’t quit either, though, which is personally satisfying.

Look in the lower left window quadrant. See the green and yellow?

It’s amazing what you can do in a year. What have you done this year? What do you want to do? Break it down into manageable chunks, and I think you’ll succeed. This is all I’m going to write today, after torturing you all with last week’s magnum opus of rambling. I’ll leave you with two pictures, to show what the construction workers outside my window have accomplished in the 9 months that I’ve lived here.

It got bigger (I think this is the final height, but I'm not sure).