Currently Reading A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (Official Guides to the Appalachian Trail) By Bill Bryson see related

I just realized that I can use Xanga at my new job - I think because the embassies and international companies here are allowed to have different internet capabilities than everyone else. I'm so excited that I'm back on, even though I know things have been slowish in the Xanga world for the past 6 months (or 1 year). Anyway, I'm back so you can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, I feel that I don't have too much to report from the past 6 months. I did get a new job at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, which I started about 7 weeks ago. I'm supervising 3 units in the immigration section - registry, reception, and the interpreters. All in all I'm responsible for about 30-35 people. It's a pretty big job - I trained for 6 weeks and had my first official week as the bossman last week. It's a pretty good group I'm supervising - mostly Chinese and Filipino staff, with a few Africans and Canadians thrown in for good measure. It's a big job in a lot of ways and I have constant anxiety about screwing it up, but I'm starting to feel a little more comfortable in it. It's cool that I get to work pretty closely with some friends of mine here (people I became friends with before starting to work at the embassy). I think I'm going to become Newman though because, much like the mail, the work never stops. It's all about processing immigrant applications, and they them aplenty here in China. So it's always incoming. "Because the mail never stops! It just keeps coming and coming and coming, there's never a let up! It's relentless! Everyday it piles up more and more and more! And you gotta get it out but the more you get it out the more it keeps coming in! And then the bar code reader breaks and it's Publisher's Clearing House day!"

The book I'm reading right now is awesome. I highly recommend it to everyone. First of all the guy is hilarious. Secondly it's really strengthening my resolve to hike the Appalachian Trail as soon as possible. Depending on how things work out here, I'm hoping to do a year in this job (until June '08) and then go back to NY and hopefully hike the AT for 6-8 weeks before starting grad school in September. As is always the case, I suppose a million things could change between now and then, but that would be ideal. Sean may be available to do it with me since he's thinking of leaving his job next summer. That would be sweet. I really want to do it, but there's no way I'd do it alone. If I'm going to die by bear attack, I want to bring someone down with me (hopefully the bear, but I'd like a human back up too just in case).

I should really do some work, but I'm really excited to be back on Xanga! I hope you guys will still check my site so I can get some comments going!