Everyone is asking me about Christmas. We started decorating our house yesterday. We have a lot of Santas that my wife inherited from her mother.
At church, I played the part of a wiseman in the nativity scene. The scene shows the birth of Jesus, and the angels, wisemen, and shepherds that visited Him. We were all volunteers from parts of the church. Last night the Mary was from Kazakhstan and invited friends and family who passed by to sit down and have their pictures taken with us if they had a camera. Almost every Russian speaking family had a camera.The nativity scene was outside the church. The first night it was in the parking lot, but almost nobody came. The next night we moved it next to the other Christmas events.
Inside the auditorium there was a musical, a play that told a story with songs.
Another booth ouside allowed children to dress as shepherds, wisemen, or angels and have their picture taken and then given to them. We had a table where people could have some hot chili to eat in the cold and then the gymnasium/high school room was filled with desserts where people could sit and eat at tables while musicians sang.
My friends in Enping know that I began the year with only one or two students in my afternoon class. I worried that my class might be cancelled. That changed about two weeks ago when I began to get more immigrant students. I now have students from Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Iran, and Mexico. Today I had 22 students and last week I asked the principal if I could have students on Friday again and he agreed to let me do that. I’m excited!
Here’s site that may be of interest to those of you hoping to improve your vocabulary: Lextutor There are tools for analyzing texts and testing your vocabulary level.
I am not able to come to China this summeer. I have longed to come, and I hope to come in 2008. I won’t come in 2008 for the Olympics, but I will come to Enping to see my friends and help teachers and students with their English. Since I can’t come to Enpin this summer, I plan to change the Enping website in the next few weeks so that it is easier for students and teachers to have their own blogs and articles. I will let you know more later.
Here it is November, and I haven’t written anything. I am teaching five days a week in the morning, from 8:30-11:30 (Friday stops at 11:00). My morning class is an intermediate low ESL class. My students are from Mexico, Hong Kong, China, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand (Hmong who came from Laos). It’s a fun class In the afternoon,
I am looking forward to chatting and e-mailing with Enping students, especially those of you who have one of the teachers I know. Please write a response to this blog, telling me a little bit about yourself. I’d like to know your name, your grade and teacher, what you like to do in your spare time, your favorite subjects in school, and any plans you might have for the future (assuming you get a high enough score on the test). You can add anything else you like, such as your favorite singer/musician/song or something about your family.
As an example, my name is Bruce Moon. I teach English to adults in Sacramento, California. I am 57, married, and I have three grown children. In my spare time, I like to do photography, learn to do new things with my computer, garden, and read. I have quite a few animals, including over 100 cavies (guinea pigs), three llamas, three ducks, thirteen geese, chickens, rabbits, and chickens. Oh, did I mention that my wife likes animals?
You can click on the No Comments/ Comments below and add your comments. Or you can Register in the right column. All new entries and registrations go to me for approval before they appear on the web. You may have to wait a few hours to see your entry since there are 15/16 hours (it changes from 15 to 16 hours on October 30) difference between Enping in Sacramento. When you are sleeping, I am working and when you are working, I am sometimes sleeping.
Today I see Frank, my pacemaker specialist. The pacemaker is actually a small computer-like device that is buried underneath my pectoral muscle, near my heart. I made an audio blog about it. You can listen to it and see if you can answer these questions:
1. When did I get my pacemaker?
2. How much was the bill that Bruce’s wife’s health plan paid last week?
3. How did I discover that I had a problem?
4. What does the pacemaker do?
5. What will Frank, the pacemaker specialist, do today?
Here’s the computer Frank uses to program my pacemaker:
It rarely snows in Sacramento, and when it does, it only lasts about 15 minutes. We don’t live far from the Sierras, mountains that are over 3000 meters high and where it often snows in winter.
Friday I drove to Sky Mountain, a camp in the Sierra at about 5800ft. (1780m). Our church men gathered to pray and sing in what is called a “prayer encounter”. When we woke up on Saturday morning, we were surprised to find most of the ground covered with snow. It was an early snow for that altitude. It didn’t last long, but it was beautiful while it lasted. Snow, however, is very cold and because it is water, can make your clothes wet and cold quickly so I wasn’t really sad to see it go since I didn’t have extra clothes, especially shoes, for walking and playing in the snow.
Here’s a short audio blog about this:
This morning Vincent pioneered new ground when he wrote extensively about blogging in Chinese. I am sure that it was authoritative and well-written, but I have no clue what he said! He later posted again to ask why his original post wasn’t immediately posted, as I had said that if you posted before, been approved, and entered your name and e-mail, the post would be immediately entered. That’s what I thought too, but while investigating why Vincent’s comment hadn’t appeared, I found a third provision that I wasn’t aware of when I wrote my post. You see, the software this blog uses is well thought out and is designed to deal with problems that come up with blogs from time to time. One problem that I have found in other blogs is what is called “comment spam”. You know that spam is e-mail advertising things that you never asked about. Comment spam is spam that is created by robot programs that look for blog sites on the web. The reason why they post on blogs is because the blog links sometimes appear on search engines like Google. When the search engine finds the links in blog comments, the standing of the websites that are in the comments go up.
To discourage people from using comment spam on blogs to create links to promote sites on search engines, the WordPress software defaults to requiring any comments that have more than two links to be sent to the moderator. Victor made a number of links to Chinese sites that talk about blogs. When I checked my mail this morning, I didn’t see the e-mail (I get the request to moderate as automatic e-mails) about approving Victor’s blog. When I did, I approved it. Because I have had he kind of nuisance comment spam in the past, I decided to leave the over two links procedure in place, instead of removing it.
Bruce
Victor asked about being able to have a tab to go back and edit what he has written. While I don’t know how to program something like that, I did add a plugin that lets you preview before you submit. Hopefully that takes care of the need.
The word “Register” to become a blogger is only on the front page. If you are reading Comments, you won’t see it. Click on the top image that says “Enping English Blog” and you will be taken back to the front page. /..gallery/d/238-1/Untitled-8webkcc.jpg