I'm getting all the video work I've been putting off done before I go. Here's one I made of Annie with a couple of Irish instrumentals.

A few weeks ago there was a fire near my house. I was fiddling around in my office and Annie started barking at something out back. I looked and saw nothing, but heard some noise not far away and smelled something burning. I thought it was someone setting off fireworks, which happens a lot. A few minutes later I heard sirens, so I grabbed Annie's leash and we got out. When I saw it wasn't us I went back in and got my camera.

I just noticed that I've now been blogging for one year. All that time, and this is just blog #20. Not much happen around here for me to write about. Some times I feel like when Homer Simpson read a fortune cookie:

"'Today will be a day like any other day.' D'oh! It just keeps getting worse!"

I really don't like to spend that much time on the internet. After I spent a full month making the web site a year ago I've hardly touched it. I haven't even changed the Greek and Russian spellings of my name, both of which are wrong. Changing it is more work than it sounds like.

Chinese have a word: "re nao" that they use often to describe a good celebration. It's one of those words that doesn't really translate in the fullest sense. I think it would literally translate as "hot time" but it seems to be used for the concept of "noisy fun." To have both a good Chinese New Year and Lantern Festival a lot of re nao is needed. I've left both videos with the soundtrack mostly untouched, edited only for smoothness, so you can get the full sense of a Chinese celebration.

Both holidays were last month so I'm a little late getting this done.

Enjoy!

There have been a lot of these lately, here is another article I found about the growing number or Orthodox converts in America.

Local Orthodox church follows national growth

By Diane Haag

St. George Greek Orthodox, in Shreveport, has more than doubled its congregation in the past three years — to about 150 families. It has grown so much that it will hold special ceremonies this weekend to begin expanding its sanctuary.

Some new members have moved to town from Slavic countries where Orthodoxy is the predominant faith. Others have married into the church.

And a substantial number are converts from other Christian traditions. A number of cultural and theological issues contribute to the conversions, said Peter Meyendorff, a professor at St. Vladmir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York.

Many appreciate the 2,000-year history and continuity of Orthodoxy, especially as mainline Protestant churches become more liberal.

"They are searching for something with solid historical roots," Meyendorff said. "The Evangelical church is subjective, emotional and individual. And they are seeking something with more stability."

Click for the full article.

Let me know if the link goes down.

I just paid off my last credit card! When I finished university I had a big credit card debt. I had run it up b/c I needed the money for food sometimes. I paid it down, but when I went to China it just got higher. When I went to Taiwan I took out some cash on them and almost maxed them out again. When I came to Taiwan I had to make payments through my mom, but I neglected it sometimes and missed some payments, but when I opened a bank account with online banking I was finally able to manage everything myself and started paying everything off. I paid off two cards last year, but my Discover card had the biggest debt on it. And so today I made the final payment. I cut up my other cards, and I may this one as well. I don't have much use for them in Taiwan except to buy things online, and I have my ATM debit card for that. So, now I have left is my student loan, but that will take a few more years.

It has been two weeks since I started back to work. So far everything has gone smoothly. There hasn't been much work to do and the kids are still rested from their time off. I think they are, in their own way, happy to be back at least with their friends if not for learning. Today I had to grade the first big stack of book reports. This is a class where I always push the kids to do well in. A lot of them know many English words and they can read and listen well, but they have trouble expressing themselves. Since kindergarten they have learned the infinitive form of verbs and gotten used to using that in speech. They know how to make words past tense, but they don't have much practice using it correctly. Many of them are doing well and can write as much as two pages in one sitting, but I still have a few who have trouble spelling even simple words and use scrambled grammar. It takes me a while to check their books because I have to correct all their mistakes. I give them some rewards for writing a certain length, and for not making mistakes. I start with 20 tokens and subtract one point for every mistake. They use tokens to buy things at the school.

We are about half way through Lent now. Lent is a period of fasting for 40 days before Pasca (Easter). When we fast we eat only vegetarian food, vegan really, we eat no animal meat or animal products like eggs and milk, except for shell fish. Also no olive oil, which I never use anyway. This is like an exercise, a time of preparation before Pasca. During Lent there is a unique service done only at this time called the Presanctified Liturgy. Because the Divine Liturgy is a celebration of the Resurrection, and because Lent the approach to the cross, thus of sadness, Christians didn't perform the Divine Liturgy except on Saturday and Sunday, days of Resurrection year round. The Presanctified Liturgy is a sort of vespers service to allow Christians to take communion during the week. This practice is an ancient one, but the actual service was put into its final form by Pope Leo the Great in the 5th century. It has, however, fallen out of use among the western churches. The previous Sunday additional communion elements are consecrated and saved. The Presanctified Liturgy can be done on Wednesday and Friday. We have been doing it on Wednesday only.

I think I found a Chinese school that will fit me. It is called the Mandarin Times Language Center. Mandarin Times is a newspaper for children and they have a Chinese school for foreigners. It is close to my school and I think it has classes I can conveniently get to. It is supposedly the second-best private school in Taipei. The best, Taipei Language Institute, doesn't have any classes at my (low) level at convenient times. Convenient or not, I've decided I must begin taking lessons soon. In studying by myself, I am progressing well with reading, but I don't understand people very well and I avoid talking unless I must. I know some words but it is hard for me to string an intelligible sentence together, proper grammar or not. When I first started learning I only wanted to read Chinese literature, but if I become a priest here I just might need to talk to someone sometime. They begin registration for new classes next week, I'll at least go have a look.

   Making web pages is a lot of work. When I told a friend that, other than hiking, I didn't have much to do during my three week holiday she suggested that I update my web site to tell more of the story of my conversion to Orthodox Christianity. I don't think of my web site very often so I didn't realize that it had been over a year since I last updated it. I had been meaning to completely redo everything and, since the old site was full of ads and pop-ups I wanted to find a low cost server. I found found one and started designing my new site. First I needed a new banner, the old one had my old nickname 'Bill' and a Chinese name I never used much. I put my Orthodox name 'Seraphim' at the top. Next I needed to pick the characters for my Chinese name. You can read the story behind those names on my Seraphim page. After playing around with colors and designs I finally made a banner I liked using Paint Shop Pro. Next I had to change all my old pages to match the new look. Then I made the new pages for my most recent photos and added some new features. Finally, I put in the blog. There were several options, most are managed over the internet. I decided to use a program run from my computer called Blog, it is more difficult to use and the comments feature required commenters to e-mail them in, but overall it was better for my use because I could use my own format. To replace the comments feature I looked on the internet. There wasn't much, most people use simple services like WordPress or Nucleus, and what was there was out of date. I had to learn about technologies that didn't exist when I made my first web page like PHP. For some reason I couldn't get some of the PHP scripts to run properly, so I tried some CGI scripts. After a few tries I finally found one called Reblogger that did almost everything I wanted. I spent about 3 days working on this, a feature I'll be lucky if anyone uses at all, but I tend to be an obsessive perfectionist when I actually get around to doing anything.

   With the website done I went to work on my e-mail. I had been using Yahoo but decided to use my new POP3 address exclusively. I found a program called Ypops that will send and receive e-mail via Yahoo and used it to transfer all my e-mail. After transferring my address book I was done. So that is the boring story of how I set up my new web page. There was nothing much else I could talk about since this has mostly consumed my past three weeks.